‘Tuesday’ Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a Talking Bird Co-Star in A24’s Fairy Tale About Death
While Death has taken many physical forms throughout history, its core mission remains static: to shepherd a dying person’s soul out of this world and into the beyond. In “Tuesday,” the fantastical feature-length debut from Daina O. Pusić, Death is a talking macaw, voiced by Arinzé Kene, that appears before a living being in their final moments and takes them away with one swift motion of his wing. In between assignments, however, the painful pleas of his future charges — an aural reminder of the cruel necessity of his raison d’être — ring in his ear like tinnitus.
It doesn’t take long for Death to arrive in front of the terminally ill, wheelchair-using teenager Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), but it takes even less time for her to quiet the voices in his head. Just as he’s about to end her life, she disarms his foreboding presence with a lame joke and then talks him through a panic attack. The voices suddenly disappear, providing a brief respite for the otherworldly being. You see, Death might be a size-altering bird, but Tuesday recognizes that he also needs what anyone who has a lot going on needs: to take a nice bath, vape a little weed, and probably set some boundaries to offset the toll high emotional intelligence takes on one’s mental health. After all, stress can just easily fall away when you rap along to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” (“A classic,” Death intones as he stares at Tuesday’s laptop.)
It’s a genuine testament to Pusić that this type of earnest whimsy — present throughout the film in some capacity — doesn’t render “Tuesday” a dead-on-arrival, teeth-grinding nightmare, even when it tumbles headlong into some cringeworthy ideas (did I mention a CGI bird briefly raps an Ice Cube verse?). Fortunately, the writer-director has some prior experience with high-concept visual and narrative ideas. In her 2013 short film “The Beast,” a pesky bat (another VFX creation) drives a wedge between an elderly woman and her even older mother. Pusić’s follow-up, “Rhonna & Donna,” chronicles two teenage conjoined-twin sisters in the midst of a nasty fight while starring in a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.”
Strained familial relations and fanciful intrusions are recurring concepts for Pusić, to say the least. In “Tuesday,” the primary subject isn’t the Grim Macaw or its eponymous character, but rather Zora, Tuesday’s mother, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Deep in denial about the reality of her daughter’s condition, Zora spends as little time with Tuesday as possible. She wiles away her time sitting in the park or bartering knickknacks to taxidermists for spare cash. She maintains a shaky ruse of still being employed to her daughter and her regular nurse (Leah Harvey), but they both suspect the truth. When Tuesday, who receives a brief stay of execution from Death in exchange for her kindness, gently tries to inform Zora about her imminent passing, her mother’s stubborn, avoidant personality rears its ugly head. It clearly isn’t the first time Tuesday has been forced into an adult role while Zora emotionally regresses into adolescence.
“Tuesday” can needlessly underline this somewhat-trite relationship dynamic, but Louis-Dreyfus and Petticrew successfully imbue it with a mix of tenderness and irritation. Tuesday’s patience towards her mother, rooted in a resigned acceptance of her illness, combined with Zora’s worn, brave-face expression tend to bring out the best in both performers. After Zora buys the two of them some more time when she impulsively tries to “kill” Death, the details of which should go unspoiled, mother and daughter share a lovely morning together. They exchange relaxed banter and goofy jokes in the warm confines of their London flat, and yet tension persists on the margins of even the most caring moments. It finally bubbles over when Tuesday discovers how much Zora has sacrificed for her while also exhibiting a complete disregard for her wellbeing.
Pusić’s script avoids some child-cancer film clichés by characterizing the mother as a frequently combative figure, someone who would browbeat her sick daughter out of misguided self-preservation than actually face reality. But while the early scenes between Louis-Dreyfus and Petticrew bring the best out of “Tuesday,” and go some way to stem the inevitable tide of mawkish emotion, they’re both operating from a fundamentally lopsided position that eventually becomes difficult to ignore. Louis-Dreyfus’ performance, which cycles through all five stages of grief without much explicit signposting, tends to strand Pettigrew in a fundamentally reactive role, even as the writing insists on the character’s dynamism.
This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Tuesday wasn’t such a thinly drawn character, but she generally exists to be a level-headed figure in the face of wanton dysfunction. I suppose it’s ironic that she spends an inordinate amount of time calming other people down — her mother, her nurse, Death — even as she struggles alone with pain, but this mild cleverness mostly exposes the flimsiness of her characterization. “Tuesday” might mainly be a mother’s story, but by the end, the daughter feels more like a teaching tool rather than a full-fledged person.
As much as death lingers over “Tuesday,” the actual character isn’t on screen that much, despite being the film’s most “spectacular” invention. One would assume Death manifesting as a talking bird would be the film’s biggest liability, but Pusić actually introduces it with naturalistic ease and embraces its unreality. Its compositing can sometimes be distractingly dodgy, but to the film’s credit, the creature is never supposed to be a seamless part of its environment. It’s designed to be an interruption whose alarming presence tends to be unfortunately offset by Kene’s alternately ominous and cutesy voice performance.
For much of the film, Pusić shrewdly sidesteps needless exposition about how Death operates or Zora and Tuesday’s background only for her two/three-hander to eventually get caught up in the logic of its central conceit. The second half of “Tuesday” involves Zora taking up Death’s mantle after his absence has thrown the world into chaos. Just in case anyone thinks that immortality would be a kick-ass time, the film reminds its audience that people actually need to die lest pain and suffering proliferate around the globe. In a hacky, visually murky montage, Zora learns this obvious lesson that she once again — surprise, surprise — fails to apply to her own situation.
Of course, Zora ultimately comprehends the depths of her daughter’s pain and faces death (and Death) square in the eye, which is when “Tuesday” hits its prescribed, tear-jerking story beats to mixed effect. A parent witnessing the passing of their child will inevitably rend hearts even with a flawed execution, and Louis-Dreyfus is certainly up to the dramatic task of conveying the depths of her character’s grief. Yet, as much as “Tuesday” strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.
Grade: C+
An A24 film, “Tuesday” is now playing in select theaters.
