Documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner has given us all a precious gift with her deeply personal film Last Flight Home. Her father Eli Timoner is the focus of this moving documentary about dying with dignity. He was the co-founder of Air Florida and with his wife Elissa they raised three children. A stroke in the early 1980s left Eli disabled. With the prejudice that came with a noticeable disability and some bad luck, Eli and his family eventually went bankrupt. Eli held onto the shame of this for many years. And for the last few weeks of his life, his family helped guide him in his journey to release this shame and to realize that his great success was the love he both gave and received.
Last Flight Home follows Eli and his family during his time at home in hospice. Because the family was based in California, he was able to opt for death with dignity so that he could pass away on his own terms. Timoner generously lets the viewer in, allowing us to feel like we are part of this very loving family. Death is a difficult subject to tackle but the more we know, the more we’re empowered to help each other and to help ourselves in this last journey in life. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as moved by a documentary as I have with this one. Thank you to the Timoner family for letting us be part of Eli’s last flight home.
Last Flight Home premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
Update: Last Flight Home is distributed by MTV Documentary Films and hits theaters October 7th, 2022.
Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) has just celebrated the success of her latest dance production but something isn’t right. She’s been in remission from lung cancer since last Christmas. But now she’s suffering from debilitating headaches and her eyesight has gotten so bad she can no longer read. When she visits the doctor and gets an MRI, she’s given terrible news. Her cancer is back in the form of a large tumor in her brain. It’s treatable but incurable and she will soon die of the disease.
At first she keeps this a secret with her distant and workaholic husband Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård). The news draws them together while at the same time the problems they’ve endured throughout their 20 year union come bubbling up to the surface. Anja struggles with how to tell her blended family of children, her dad and her friends. We follow her and Tomas as Anja puts into place her plans for her final treatments and her final days with those she loves most. Through it all she must hold on to a glimmer of hope that everything will be okay.
Directed by Maria Sødahl and based on a true story, Hope is a heart-wrenching film that will leave you emotionally devastated. We’re seated right next to Anja on her roller coaster ride of emotions. We feel her fear, her pain and her paranoia. End-of-life situations are complicated and messy. I love that Sødahl’s film doesn’t tie up everything neatly into a big bow. Instead she allows the viewer to see the bad and the good and every shade in between. Hovig is more than capable to take us on her character’s journey and delivers a breathtaking performance. Skarsgård’s solemn delivery pairs beautifully with Hovig’s. It’s through his tender approach and his support of Anja that we have some emotional foundation.
The story is told over Christmas and New Year’s when the holidays delay access to specialists and puts pressure on Anja to make the season a happy one for her children. I thought the time frame to be an ingenious touch which elevated the stakes in Anja’s story. Hope is a film you may want to avoid and I almost did myself. But I’m so glad I gave over 2 hours of my life so a beautiful film could break my heart.
Hope had its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival as part of their Discovery series.
Update: Hope will have a virtual theatrical release on April 16th, 2021.
They say celebrities die in threes. They die the way the rest of humanity dies but their fame elevates the awareness of their passing and casts a wider net for mourners. We’re despondent over the deaths of people we may have never met in real life. These deaths come as a shock, even when our favorite celebrity is of advanced age or has known health problems. It puts us in a vulnerable place. It puts us face-to-face with our own mortality. For some people, they decide to take back some of the control death has over us with celebrity death pools. The gamification eases some of the grief if we know its coming.
A group of friends who refer to themselves as “Riplisters” come together every January to create a draft of the 15 celebrities they believe will die within that calendar year. Each participant has their own draft, or “Riplist”. The selection process is long and involved. The participants negotiate, research and strategize. Eligible celebrities can come from all different walks of life whether they are actors, musicians, athletes, royalty, politicians, etc. Whomever gets the most right on their Riplist wins a trophy and bragging rights. The participant with the fewest correct has to draft first the next go around. Some celebrities seem like a sure thing but other deaths elude the riplisters.
Writer/Director Mike Scholtz’s new documentary Riplist chronicles the participants in this group and focuses primarily in the drafting process. As a classic film enthusiast, I was particularly interested in Matt, a film critic who owns over 4,000 movies and knows all the Oscar winning films and can recite them chronologically from memory. Other participants are mostly men but there is one woman, Christie, whose parents were morticians and now works as a death investigator. A few of the subjects are profiled and there are some frank discussions about mortality. Ultimately the Riplist is a way for them to process the idea of death. But they can take things too far. They research which celebrity is in hospice or as one subject says “who’s circling the drain.” They congratulate each other when one of their picks dies. They claim they’re not rooting for people to die but the gamification of the whole process makes it seem that way.
“The game of life is fun. Why can’t the game of death be fun?”
Some of the classic film related people mentioned
Olivia de Havilland
Jerry Lewis
Elizabeth Taylor
Kirk Douglas
Robert Osborne
Norman Lloyd
Baby Peggy/Diana Serra Cary
Don Rickles
“I do enjoy it. I don’t know why but I do.”
However for me what these Riplisters were doing left a bad taste in my mouth. And I’m one of the most morbid people you’ll meet. Death fascinates me and if you were to look at my browser history you may back away cautiously and run in the other direction. However, I dread the day that my favorite classic film stars, many of whom are in their 80s, 90s and 100s, pass away. I don’t like to think about it. I will never write an obituary in advance. I would never participate in a death pool. I want these people to live as long as humanly possible. Hoping someone dies so you can win a game just seems flat out wrong. It’s asking for bad karma.
With that said, I believe it’s important to explore the different ways people deal with death. And while the film’s subject matter is quite heavy, Scholtz takes a lighter approach that will relieve viewers of some of the inevitable tension that would have otherwise been overwhelming. The documentary has fun with the lower third, the subjects are interviewed in interesting places, for example a grocery store, taxidermist’s lab, cemetery and mausoleum. There are some reenactments which are a bit hokey but that also adds to the fun.
Essentially Riplist is a dark comedy with a healthy mix of gravitas and humor. It presents a difficult subject in an approachable way. For my fellow classic movie fanatics however, the ones who are praying their favorites won’t be dying anytime soon, Riplist is your next horror film.
Riplist is part of IFFBoston’s Documentary Features series.
