Ramble on

Our Friend is a 2019 true-life drama that came out to little fanfare, and so when I stumbled onto it on Prime I thought this might be Gen-Z campy and soapy and self-involved.  Why not?  The stars kind of indicate that:  Jason Segal, Casey Affleck, and Dakota Johnson.  But truth be told I also have a deep deep love for Dakota, so there's that.  Something about her face and demeanor reminds me of really nice girls in high school who got all the jokes and stood up for the people nobody stood up for.  

So Bill and I watched it, and we lost our shit.  From the get-go it was ravishingly emotional and somehow not over-the-top.  The story is about a reporter whose beautiful wife has ovarian cancer, and they both share a really great best friend. The husband and wife are Affleck and Dakota, the best friend Segal, and the whole movie is blissfully orchestrated around the wife's diagnosis and how the three of them meet, fight, find solace, find a way to go on together and also without eachother.   If that all sounds campy and soapy, it really isn't.  There's a truthful sweet throughline, and it kind of emanates from Dakota's unaffected, whispery, deadpan joy, and also the way she inhabits every moment of the woman's life with a sort of earthy reverence that might sound a tadbit twee, but when witnessing it it's kind of all the way transcendent.  

Gabriela Cowperthwaite directs with this weird intimate sense of flow, from nuanced scene to vignette to close-ups to die for.  The cinematography has that serious-drama glaze to it, but also a warmth winthin the glaze, like everything you're experiencing is inside a magic lantern, all the horror and kindness and hurt and happiness, all of that comes through not as depicted realness, but as a sort magical realism that doesn't depend on magic, just people.

All the way through I kept thinking of my mom's death and people I love going through major shit like this, and I found a deep solace in the whole shebang.  I was bawling my eyes out, wanting to cry more somehow.  

Affleck and Segal are wonderful too, but it's Dakota's movie.  Somehow she finds a way to merge who she is with the woman she's playing without it being a tribute to strength or perseverence, but as a tribute to everyone we've ever lost.  Like a saint's departure fueled by Led Zeppelin music.  Which is probably one of the loveliest bits within Our Friend:  in a montage sequence depicting the woman's slide into final days, "Ramble On" is played.  You get to revisit that song, and it's revised by the movie's context and purpose, and for a moment Led Zeppelin becomes sacred in the best, stupidest and most beautiful way.  It's a hymn to what life can do to you and also what you can do when it's almost over.

Plus Cherry Jones as a hopsice nurse.  Damn.