If there is a lesson Jim Jarmusch is trying to impart in his latest feature, Father Mother Sister Brother (and dear Lord, let’s hope he is not), it is this: Nobody knows anybody. Even when you are related. Maybe especially when you are related.
A thoughtful, intermittently comic three-parter about the ties that bind and baffle, the film is linked more by mood, theme, and the occasional joking callback than story or recurring characters. In each segment, a pair of siblings travels to a rendezvous with their familial past and comes away almost more mystified than they were before. The lack of a resolution may frustrate those looking for secrets and discoveries, but it will not surprise anybody familiar with Jarmusch’s precisely filmed yet often hazily plotted work.
Quieter than his anthology films like 1991’s Night on Earth (another mysterious mood piece which feels closest in spirit to this one), Father Mother Sister Brother starts with its most clear-cut story and moves from there to deeper levels of unknowability. In “Father”, Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik, sharp and precise) are brother and sister, driving deep into the woods to check on their secretive father (Tom Waits).
More is left unsaid than said. Jeff’s wide-open, credulous manner declares all that is needed about his being the eager-to-help offspring. Emily’s sharp questions and weighted silences, especially about the money Jeff has given their supposedly impoverished father, suggest she believes he has been misleading them their entire lives.
Nothing in their encounter makes it seem that Emily is wrong. Glimpsed quickly hiding things before his children’s arrival, the father (played by Waits like a con artist past his prime who doesn’t realize his moves aren’t as slick as they once were) is standoffish and clearly eager for them to leave. Dead air fills the room as the three grasp futilely for anything to talk about, Jeff’s eagerness to please and Emily’s taut skepticism finding no purchase with the father’s bland generalities.
The funniest of Father Mother Sister Brother’s stories, “Father” is filled with dryly hilarious Jim Jarmuschian deadpan and a final reveal which is more comedic for everything it doesn’t explain.
“Mother” is even more awkward. Charlotte Rampling plays the matriarch, a Dublin-dwelling author with a stiff, aristocratic countenance. Her limited desire for emotional engagement is signaled by her book titles (Boundaries of Love). Daughters Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and Timothea (Cate Blanchett) arrive separately for tea. It is suggested that this apparently annual ritual is the only time the three come together.
Within seconds, it is apparent why. The conversation starts off rote and stilted, soon dying out completely, with the only sounds being the sipping of tea and the eating of delectable-looking cakes by these strangers loosely orbiting each other. Like the father, the mother reads as not exactly antagonistic towards her children but perfectly content with having them out of sight and out of mind.
As in “Father”, these siblings play different roles in front of a parent who is not openly disapproving but distant and possibly disinterested. Lilith (given a subtly charged performance by Krieps) is the rebellious one, while “Tim” (invested by Blanchett with a prim schoolboy innocence) sees herself as the good one. By the end of this icy encounter, though, both appear similarly saddened, having failed to secure even a glimmering of whatever it was they came to tea at mother’s for.
“Sister Brother” stands apart from the first two stories for featuring very close siblings and no living parents. Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) are headed to their late parents’ Paris apartment to finish emptying it out. This segment moves more than the others, with the two zipping through Pigalle, stopping at a café for a purposeful Coffee and Cigarettes-like interlude of caffeine and conversation, and conversing with ease and warmth.
Oddly, that connection the two have (“twin factor” is their private joke about discovering another thing they share) keeps “Sister Brother” from having the tension of “Father” or “Mother”. Jarmusch repeats many of the little sight or verbal gags he dropped earlier on (Rolex watches, references to “Nowheresville”). Yet even though there is more warmth of connection here, the spirit of melancholy persists.
Each story in Father Mother Sister Brother contains a mystery that the audience knows more about than the characters, who are grappling in confusion. Jarmusch could have given the siblings some Freudian revelation, which they might have felt explained their parents. His decision to leave the siblings largely in the dark feels like the right one.
Some gaps, particularly those with blood relations, cannot be bridged. By the end of Father Mother Sister Brother, the unknowability of these siblings’ parents seems less like a burden than a relief.