How do you capture a life? After all, there is nothing more breathtakingly vast than an existence full of joy, pain, pleasure and agony. Doing so is an immense undertaking that requires honesty and care in equal measure as we must look deeply at someone to expose all of what made them who they are without also hiding all of what can be many rough edges.
“Jimpa,” the latest film from “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” director Sophie Hyde, does this about as fully as one could ever hope to do. In a script Hyde wrote with her “52 Tuesdays” co-writer Matthew Cormack, we are taken fully into the world of Jim (aka Jimpa), played by John Lithgow, and his daughter Hannah, played by Olivia Colman, as they try to navigate their respective lives. Jim is a gay man who left Hannah and her mother when she was a child and she is now attempting to make a film about him while also raising her own child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), who is nonbinary.
As they all spend time together in the beauty of Amsterdam, the love they have for each other comes crashing into the lingering tension that Hannah has spent most of her adult life attempting to not just process, but speak openly about.
The result is a film that’s not just incisive and compassionate, but fully attuned to the rhythms of this modern family. Conversations around queerness, polyamory and sexuality take place throughout in ways that embrace their complexity rather than shy away from them. In a world that seeks not just to repress such conversations but target those who have them, it is as refreshing as it is essential to see a film tackling them with such frankness.
As we hear them talk with radical openness about some things, Hyde pulls off a delicate balancing act where we come to see that there is also much that they are not yet fully able to talk through. It’s a film built around such conversations and our desire for connection that may be a little fragmented at times but cuts deep all the same.
Just as last year’s Sundance saw the excellent film “A Real Pain” capture the delicate relationship between two cousins, this one sees its own messy family trying to open up to each other and make sense of the pain they’re feeling before it’s all too late. It earns every emotion and then some, breaking the heart open with such breathtaking truthfulness that you get bowled over just before you land softly in its final frames. That it is also a film partly about its very construction only makes it all the more wonderfully rich to experience.
Premiering Thursday at Sundance, “Jimpa” begins with Hannah and Frances talking about Jim. The former is doing so as part of a pitch about the film she wants to make about her father, and the latter is doing so for a class presentation. Both are earnestly passionate and clearly love him, though there is still a sense that we are hearing a possibly rosy portrait of the man. Critically, this earnestness must not be mistaken for complete honesty.
Instead, as Hyde gently teases out, we realize that Hannah in particular is invested in not expressing anger or even conflict about her father. This results in a humorous opening conversation about how all dramas must contain some element of conflict, but “Jimpa” doesn’t just use this for jokes. It is also flagging up to us that the film we are watching is about someone attempting to reckon with their past and the challenges of making art that can do full justice to this. That it does so within some of the familiar narrative beats of the family dramedy is part of its potency. Not only does Hyde remain aware of how the overly saccharine version of this film could go, she holds it up to the light in order to see all the ways the narratives we fall back on may actually be hiding critical parts of the lives we lead.
You see, Jim is a flawed man as well as a caring one. He fought for the civil rights of others, speaking out after being diagnosed with AIDS even as the world was fighting him at every turn. And he has tried to continue doing so even in his older age. He is also egotistical, selfish and occasionally cruel, especially when he doesn’t always listen to others.
Lithgow, all tattooed up and often bearing his body in addition to his soul, is terrific at capturing all the seemingly contradictory yet completely authentic layers of the man. He is capable of turning a scene on its head with such withering charm and conviction that you go along with it until you realize just how hurtful he can be to the others around him. Alongside Colman, whose eyes contain entire worlds of tumultuous emotion in these scenes, we feel how it is the family has settled into this comfortable uncomfortableness.
However, if there is a breakout star in the film, it is Aud Mason-Hyde. That they are the child of director Hyde only makes it all the more engaging as we can feel an extra sense of natural lived-in emotion in the way the scenes unfold. Even alongside heavy-hitters like Lithgow and Colman, it is remarkable how effortlessly Mason-Hyde holds their own. In many ways, their scenes are what bring everything out that the adults are looking away from. Even when there are some conversations amongst the older generation that can feel a little clunky in how they underline what they are saying, it is Mason-Hyde who brings us into the more complicated gray areas that are necessary to understanding what “Jimpa” is attempting to grapple with. For all the joy that Frances discovers in the city and the desire they have to move away from home in order to find community, we see in their eyes how life is not always so simple. When tragedy does inevitably arise, it makes the quiet and often unspoken details of their performance all the more impactful.
As we see in the hands of cinematographer Matthew Chuang, who previously shot the gorgeous “You Won’t Be Alone,” the past and present are always crashing together. It is in these striking juxtapositions that the lives of all the characters come into greater focus. There is pain in how they are intercut into the present, but there is also a captivating quality to them that only cinema can provide. At times, it even recalls the shattering way director Barry Jenkins captured the various characters in his astounding adaptation “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
With that being said, there is still much that Hyde uncovers that she can call her own in her directing. The way moments will linger and intersect takes the breath away just as they never feel like they are overdone. It’s all one would hope a film like this to be: honest, bittersweet and true. In the end, whether Hannah the character is able to make her film, Hyde has done so herself in beautiful fashion.
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