‘Dying’ Review: Lars Eidinger Carries The Weight Of Matthias Glasner’s Deep And Darkly Funny Family Drama

Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) is huddled on the floor in her nightgown, trying to ring her son. Her legs and nightgown are smeared brown with her regular nightly incontinence, but it is her husband who worries her: Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer) has wandered outside again, not sure where he is and wearing no pants. Her neighbor is at the door, insisting on being helpful, while Lissy just wants her to cut short this humiliation; has she spotted that even the phone is now daubed with excrement?

Old age ain’t no place for sissies, as Bette Davis famously said. The usual riposte is that it’s better than the alternative, but Matthias Glasner’s long, absorbing and intermittently very funny film calls that into question. Life, even before the debilities of age become its main feature, is the real difficulty.

Glasner’s story is a version of a traditional family saga, but deconstructed to become a series of overlapping chapters about the family’s component individuals. The fact is that Lissy, Gerd, son Tom and his sister Ellen clearly do not cohere as a family and, as a grimly humorous truth-telling session between Lissy and Tom will reveal, never really did. Lissy cares for Gerd equably enough, but when she has a heart attack and he is put into a care home, what shows on her face is her unspoken relief at being able to concentrate on her own ailments.

At that point, a  new chapter is introduced that will center on Tom (Lars Eidinger), a junior orchestral conductor in a different city: he works in Berlin, while they are in Hamburg. Tom is officially unattached, but has undertaken to be a stand-in father to his former partner’s new baby. He is helping to deliver little Jessie at the precise moment his mother calls him.. “A pity it isn’t yours,” Lissy says sourly.

Tom is busy, as he says, conducting a new work — called “Dying” — by his tortured composer friend Bernhard (Robert Gwisdek). Bernhard has been talking for 20 years about killing himself; Tom is the friend who gets his despairing late-night calls and bears the brunt of his frequent bouts of rage. He is less indulgent towards his sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) when she calls; she is a drunk in love with her own dissipation, a bar-room queen who sings before throwing up on the floor and regularly wakes up in rooms she doesn’t recognize. “Ring me,” says Tom at one point, “when you haven’t been drinking.”

One of the great pleasures of this film is the contradictions in its characters: Tom is a born helper, generous and kind, but women accuse him of being cold-hearted and, despite appearances, he knows they’re right. Music is his love. A sequence in which he conducts a rehearsal of Bernhard’s piece “Dying”, showing the rapt faces of the musicians in his youth orchestra before returning to Eidinger’s expression of transported joy as the sound pours towards his podium, is profoundly moving in a way that resists analysis: here is the power and beauty of art, a solid glory in the midst of this muddle of grievances, longings and unsettled lives.

Glasner has a  fine ear for absurdity and the bleak humor to be found in failure; when Lissy admits to Tom that she was not merely a bad mother, but an abusive one,  her lack of embarrassment is hilarious in itself. The fact that drunken Ellen is a dental nurse is another joke, underlined when she has to extract her drinking buddy’s tooth in a bar’s toilet, hooking one foot against the washbasin to gain traction as she pulls on a set of repurposed carpenter’s pliers.

It doesn’t always work this well, admittedly: Ellen’s degeneracy can feel overstated, even ridiculous. That she would hold on to her job even after collapsing over a patient with a drill in his mouth defies belief. So does the idea that Bernhard could slap around young musicians at the Berlin Philharmonic without HR raising hell, defies belief; Dying never pretends to be social realism, with its heightened color and interleaved chapter headings, but at these moments it feels as if it is subsiding into melodrama.

It is pulled back from the brink, however, by the quiet strength of Eidinger’s central performance and the attention paid by the director and the other actors to the details of old age and addiction; every character rings true, even if their situations occasionally do not. And those moments of excess have their own narrative logic. To stuff so much death and dying into one story, however voluminous, is a formidable challenge, but Glasner manages his vast stage by allowing  waves of feeling to roll forward and then retreat; its intensity is measured, interspersed with those respites of humor.

And so we beat against the tide, reaching a satisfying point where Tom, at least, seems to have reached some sort of happiness — at least until death comes to claim him, as it does all of us. That isn’t even a dismal thought. In a certain light, it can be seen as a bit of a laugh.

Title: Dying
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Sales agent:  Match Factory
Director/screenwriter: Matthias Glasner
Cast: Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangerberg, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Ronald Zehrfeld
Running time: 3 hr