If they're just Jason Segel and Cherry Jones, who don't appear to have any relationship with one another outside of the two recent movies they've both been in, then I guess it's just random.
What their appearance in my #1 of 2021, Our Friend, and their appearance in what has the potential to be the worst film I see in 2022, The Sky is Everywhere, does, is that it allows me to compare the two films in other ways, and there's some pretty good meat there. Enough to write a blog post, anyway.
In Our Friend, Segel plays the friend of the title, Dane, who drops everything in his life when his friend, Nicole (Dakota Johnson), and his other friend, Matt (Casey Affleck), have to keep their lives together following Nicole's terminal cancer diagnosis. He becomes effectively an uncle to Nicole and Matt's two daughters. Jones doesn't turn up until the last ten minutes or so, when she plays an in-home hospice nurse who helps a basically unconscious Nicole through her final couple days. Her role may be small but her impact is large, as her presence creates exactly the sense of calm one would hope to feel during a period of terrible inevitability. One of the lines of dialogue that really gets me is when she talks about the impending end to Nicole's struggles, and says "And won't that be a blessing." Yes, when you are as sick as Nicole, the blessing is not to survive another day -- the blessing is not surviving that day.
In The Sky is Everywhere, Segel and Jones also play characters with a proximity to death and grieving, but this time, they're biologically related. Jones plays Segel's mother, and Segel is an actual uncle to the main character, Lennie (Grace Kaufman), who is dealing with the comparatively recent death of her older sister. Segel is probably the one who tries to do the comforting here, a natural fit for his stoner tendencies, while Jones is more the giver of tough love, the one who surreptitiously boxes up Lennie's sister's belonging that Lennie had intentionally left strewn about her bedroom, to Lennie's great anger and frustration. (Though to be honest, Segel shrugs off the responsibility more often than not.)
Despite these films having many similar themes, and the obvious similarity of both featuring Segel and Jones, they couldn't be more different from one another. Both in terms of their approach and in terms of my diametrically opposed feelings toward them.
If you want to add one further point of similarity, both films are directed by women, but Gabriela Cowperthwaite has Josephine Decker beat by a mile.
Our Friend, a film I gave five stars and named my favorite of 2021, is certainly about grief, mostly about the anticipation of future grief. When someone you love has terminal cancer, you are basically pre-grieving until they die. The movie has to be about that, of course, but it doesn't have to be about only that. Yes there are plenty of logistics related to the end of Nicole's life and some of them are quite heavy, but there's a lot of joy and despair and soul-searching that has nothing to do with the actual cancer, but more to do with friendships and career goals and a person's trajectory in life. The fact that the film has a flashback structure, where we're treated to generous helpings of character dynamics from long before Nicole even received her diagnosis, inevitably means that it is focusing on nothing so narrow as this cancer itself. When it does indulge in the traditional emotional payoffs involved with disease movies, they are well earned, and more powerful for their relative scarcity.
The Sky is Everywhere, a film I gave half a star and expect to be right at the bottom of my 2022 rankings given that I didn't see a single 2021 film that I gave such a low star rating, is also about grief. Boy is it about grief. But the film's problem is not that it is this lugubrious affair from start to finish, where a character is just reacting really badly to her sister's death and can't get over it. That would at least be something, as no one would expect a person to get over the death of a sibling in less than a year, and would expect her to display the signs of that grief on a regular basis. No, the problem is that this movie jumps wildly back and forth between a twee sort of mania marked by magical realism and DIY eccentricity, that would make Amelie Poulain and Michel Gondry take turns vomiting over its excesses, and these ridiculous bouts of crying and fresh despair that make you sit up and take notice because they represent such an abrupt tonal shift from what was occurring just a moment before. If you think my reaction is a failure to properly appreciate the multiplicity of ways grief rears its head, I invite you to watch this movie and tell me if you can stand sitting through more than ten minutes of it. On second thought, don't. I really don't want to do that to you.
I appear -- yet again -- to be in the minority in my impression of this film, which I reviewed here if you would like to read a half-dozen other epic takedowns. Its Metacritic score is a solid 67, which features 11 positive reviews, five mixed reviews and only a single negative review. My idol Joe Morgenstern is one of the positive reviews, though it should be noted that the excerpt from his review expresses some of my reservations despite his ultimately positive take on the film.
But trust me -- they're wrong. They don't get it. You really will want to gouge your eyes out. It's always hyperbole when people say that ... and yes, it's hyperbole this time too. But not by all that much.
So where does this leave me in terms of Segel and Jones, two actors whose work in Our Friend felt like a capper on years of their work that I've loved? But who are now in this oversaturated abomination of weepie teen romance cliches where characters float through the air and write their wishes on leaves?
I guess I won't know until their next collaboration.
