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Toward the end of the deep-feeling, deliciously histrionic drama “Closing Night,” the film shifts tone. The first two acts — a whirlwind of long-deferred confrontations and fiery disclosures — lean on lively dark comedy
as a pair of warring sisters explode with decades of rage and resentment. Then the film slows its pace, doubling down on doleful sentimentality as it transitions into a more traditional tearjerker.
The thrilling turbulence of the film’s start and middle make the total despondency at the end feel a little disappointing. But one can also understand why first-time feature director Cody Fern veered into such melancholic terrain. An Australian actor (“American Horror Story”) who co-wrote the screenplay with Dylan Bostick, Fern is consciously working in a rich tradition of matrilineal melodrama. By zeroing in on fragile and anguished women, he positions his characters in a long lineage of cinematic heroines in extremis.
Here, the emotionally besieged are Sandra (Sarah Paulson) and April (Naomi Watts), middle-aged sisters from Michigan who have been bitterly estranged since they were teenagers. Sandra, who moved to Hollywood at 15, is a renowned actress of stage and screen. April is a hairdresser who never left home, and works at the beauty salon owned by their mercurial mother, Diane (Dianne Wiest). The source of the family’s hostility — which dates to immediately before Sandra decamped — is the film’s first major mystery, although it’s soon clear that it hinges on Theo (Toby Wallace), the son April raised on her own.
When the film begins, Sandra has extended an olive branch to April and Diane by inviting them to New York to see her perform on Broadway. Diane refuses, but April hesitantly makes the trip, only to learn that Theo — an artistic dilettante who lives in the city with his girlfriend, Lucy (Odessa A’zion) — has been lunching with Sandra behind her back. April receives the news as a betrayal. But Theo, long kept in the dark about his mom and aunt’s rupture, sees the meetings as a chance to get to know the famous relative who was, until then, a stranger.
There is an epic theatrical streak running through this family’s female line: a sense that, even in private moments, they imagine themselves cast under a spotlight. Fern establishes this mode during an early scene at the Broadway show, in which he cuts back and forth between Sandra’s line readings onstage and a furious exchange of stage whispers between April and Theo in the audience. By juxtaposing the spectacle of the play with the fuss in the seats, Fern signals that “Closing Night” is itself an exercise in performance. Sandra may be the only professional actress, but April and Diane are equally dramatic — and if Paulson, Watts and Wiest’s performances seem consequently heightened, that’s by design.
Sandra’s play is cut short when she collapses onstage, setting in motion a principal storyline that involves a health crisis. It’s only a little implausible that Sandra should receive her life-altering diagnosis while her distant sister happens to be in town; remember, the film is operating according to the dramatic logic of an elevated reality. The diagnosis is cataclysmic, bringing Sandra’s career to an abrupt close. And because the disease attacks her memory, it also lends a new weight to the film’s fixation on old wounds. What’s the relationship between repairing and remembering? Can this sibling damage be forgiven, or must it be forgotten?
The film’s world is composed of dimly lit spaces dressed in moody hues: oxblood, emerald, indigo. Sandra’s stately Manhattan home might as well be located underground for how dark she keeps the place; the curtains are almost always drawn, suggesting her desire for privacy, her tendency toward isolation. The gloom lifts in one crucial scene, late in the film, in which Sandra and April sit side by side before a bright window. Gazing into the sunlight, they seem to confirm that the forlorn moment is also the film’s brightest one.
In time, Theo and Lucy, two characters more grounded in realism, recede from the picture, providing space for the hysterical matriarchs to really have at one another. Feverish with feeling, the women scream, wail and sob, each one experiencing her misery multiply in real time as the remaining two look on in disdain. The film wisely allows us to see each character’s side, and the three actresses, contorting their faces and their bodies, are entrancing. The great Wiest, clad in leopard print and lipstick, slurs and spits her lines. Watts transforms into a quivering mound of anxiety. And a stellar Paulson expertly exudes snide arrogance, until Sandra breaks open entirely.
Fern’s images are stylish, but his capacity for mood building is his greatest feat. “Closing Night” is, on its face, a somber film, a story of grudges and trauma buried so deep that it’s exhumed only at the last possible moment. But at its world premiere, the film also had the audience roaring with laughter. The bursts of comedy don’t lighten the mood, but instead sharpen the emotion and clarify the intensity, the way a shrewd joke might at a funeral. Even in its closing moments, when the film’s natural humor gives way to a denouement that can feel labored in its despair, “Closing Night” is a stagy delight, a rush of big, brash emotion that leaves you floored.
