I watched this on Prime last night, and I'm damn glad I did. This film was a pleasure to watch. Ignore the 1 star review, that impatient kid needs to go wait in the car, and clearly hasn't experienced a death in the family like this one. That's what was so surprising: 3 Days with Dad is beautifully relatable if you've been there. If you haven't, it's still a fabulous ensemble piece with a spectacular cast that deftly delivers a beautifully emotional haymaker I wasn't at all prepared for. It's not exactly a comedy, but it's darkly comedic and laugh out loud funny at times. Man alive, do you need that when you're facing a dying parent and the chaos of emotions, decisions and personalities that can surround it. You need distraction. With my brothers and I it was booze, and we drank a lot of it to remain distracted when ours was dying in front of us. Dying can stink, it can be sad, dirty, wayyy too practical, and it can take a long time while these emotional bundles fly at you that you never even thought about. In short, it can be crazy, and the film touches this madness with a cast of pros who are wisely given the space to hand it over.
Director Larry Clarke has made this a largely autobiographical film that works, and has serious production value on what I suspect was a shoestring. It's remarkable in that, it has excellent music and is a very good looking movie. Clarke plays Eddie Mills, an admittedly underachieving doorman whose dad Bob is dying, strikingly played pretty raw by the great Brian Dennehy in his final role. Eddie returns back home to the noise and side eye of siblings and friends, all sprinkled on top with step mom Dawn, wonderfully played by Lesley Ann Warren as the wife of 35 years who can't do anything about the fact that her husband is dying, and I think control is her usual refuge. The siblings love and bicker. The house is loud. Jokes are made, fights are fought, and it's a near constant maelstrom of adult children sometimes verbally slugging it out. One dynamic that especially hit home is with the conservative/religious older brother Andy (Tom Arnold). I got me one of those, too. "You don't pray to anyone, you just talk to yourself. You're not deserving of redemption", or thereabouts, but very familiar. It's not like Eddie and Andy don't love each other, they do, but family can be mean sometimes, and the death of a parent brings out tensions and words that sat dormant. Andy also gives a piece of advice early on that resonated with me, because I did the exact opposite: "You don't wing it with a eulogy." I winged it, and it showed, but it was good. Eddie wings it too, and even physically gets his dad involved in the funeral, and it's also good. It's participatory. All of these little touches make for a movie that is so relatable it's like walking back into the house you grew up in.
The rest of the cast is superb, a lineup of serious pros that you absolutely can't deny, you just have to watch these people deliver this film. JK Simmons, Mo Gaffney, Eric Edelstein and David Koechner (along with Clarke, they're the brother Detectives Fusco! Twin Peaks fans rejoice), Amy Landecker, Julie Ann Emery, Uncle Rico Jon Gries, and Chris Bauer delivers a priestly smack upside the head both to Eddie and to the pacing of the film, bracing everyone to get their heads together.
All this ensemble and madness leads to the real emotional impact of the movie, to that smack to the face. It's not a spoiler to say that Brian Dennehy's Dad dies in the movie, I mean it begins with his funeral, but when the inevitable comes it still hurts. 3 Days with Dad is like one long listen to the Beatles "A Day in the Life". Remember how that song builds and builds to finally hit that note? It's a cacophony of family, friends, noise, griping, sniping, snark, love, and a last minute gotta-walk-the-dog in understandably nonsensical desperation that builds and builds to a symphonic crescendo... then WHAM. That extended final note. It's by far the most painfully beautiful part of this otherwise quick and funny film, and I surprised the hell out of myself by balling. I balled a lot. Like that famous 42 second musical note, this is what all those seemingly sitcom-like moments and noise are taking us to, and it dawned on me how quite masterfully I was carried along to this singular point in the lives of each one of those characters.
I really loved this movie. You should give it a watch.
