Familiar Touch (2024): dementia drama without the melodrama

On a recent episode of the Adam Buxton Podcast, Kathy Burke spoke about going to see Alexander Zeldin’s play Care, which chronicles the last year or so of a woman’s life in a care home. After effusively describing it and the effect it had on the audience, the host asked her the inevitable follow-up question: why would you go and see that? It’s a cheeky but fair enquiry, and we can surmise some answers from the unusually high number of recent dramas about end of life care, dementia and associated issues. Some of them are righteously angry, like Marc Munden and Jack Thorne’s Covid-set Help. Plenty of them are weepies – as they used to be known – about the dilemma of caring for an unwell parent (Moon, 66 Questions) or partner (Supernova). Some, like Florian Zeller’s Oscar-winner The Father, attempt to take you inside the mind of someone with these conditions.

Sarah Friedland’s feature debut Familiar Touch is, on paper, similar to The Father. We see events from the perspective of Ruth, played by Kathleen Chalfant, a woman with dementia living in a care home. Her carers appear, as do her relatives, but they’re very much Chalfant’s scene partners. Sometimes they’re playing a scene between two people who know each other very well, and sometimes they’re playing a scene where Ruth doesn’t recognise them at all. The base line is Ruth, just as Anthony Hopkins’s character was the consistent central presence of The Father. Yet while Zeller’s film was extremely dramatic – a little melodramatic, in my opinion – in its depiction of the Lear-like terror of a man losing his sense of self, Familiar Touch has a very different attitude. Friedland has called it, somewhat disarmingly, a “coming-of-old-age film”.

Elaborating on this, the writer-director has argued that just as a conventional coming-of-age film doesn’t have to be a tragedy about the loss of childhood, a film about dementia can also be about coming to terms with a new way of being. A conventional drama about dementia, she argues, is usually told from the perspective of relatives, and as such is about the end of a person they love. But the person in question goes on living. Focusing on Ruth means focusing on her acceptance of each rise and fall in her condition. She has good days and bad days, but the bad days are at least leavened by the fact that she can’t remember the good days. We see the concern and hurt on the faces of the people near her when she’s forgetting, but for Ruth herself this is a day like any other.

It’s a bold attitude that guarantees a very subtle film, immune to the temptations of melodrama and histrionics. The most obvious thing to say is that Friedland has exactly the right leading lady for it. Chalfant is wonderful, warm and reserved, resisting the temptation to show off her research with tics and mannerisms. Friedland and Chalfant reportedly worked out a whole life story for Ruth, and Chalfant approached her performance by considering which Ruth she was going to be today – the elderly Ruth, aware of her surroundings? Middle-aged Ruth? Young Ruth? The skill of her performance lies in the fact that you can see hints of this, but only hints. There are parts of Ruth’s experience that she can’t express any more, even to the film’s audience.

As with the performance, so it is with the film. The relationship between Familiar Touch and something like Still Alice is roughly the same as the relationship between Anora and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; both of them are about the same phenomenon, but one is trying to shape it into the format of a drama and one of them is observing it as part of everyday life. It’s no insult to say Friedland is no Chantal Akerman – yet – and I did occasionally find myself yearning for some incident rather than being sucked into the film’s rhythm as thoroughly as I was with Jeanne Dielman. Refusing the temptations of melodrama is a laudable thing, but it can often make for a film that runs out of momentum in the final act. But it’s stayed in my head ever since I watched it, and – to return to Adam Buxton’s opening question – it has its own kind of charm and entertainment value. Some laughs, too: at one point Ruth asks her son if he’s seeing anyone special, and he replies “I would consider my wife fairly special”.

The son, incidentally, is played by the voice actor and comedian H. Jon Benjamin, bringing as much world-weary restraint to this very dramatic role as he does to his comedy. There aren’t many name actors in Familiar Touch, which is absolutely the right way to go with the film; the closing thank-you to Villa Gardens Continuing Care Retirement Community made me wonder if some of the staff were the real deal, and Chalfant herself is more active on stage than on screen. That’s ideal: it means she has the acting chops to play this very difficult role, but you never get the sense of a movie star begging for awards. Benjamin is the only actor I was familiar with going in, being a huge fan of his work both in Bob’s Burgers and prank-calling Sam Seder on The Majority Report. His presence here is first surprising, then charming, then finally so spot-on you wonder why you were ever surprised by it. As with the performance, so it is with the film.