(IMAGE: United Front Films)
Freestyle Digital Media, 2022. 112 minutes. Drama.
Grade: 2 out of 4
When the first melancholy piano keys strike the soundtrack of Lana Read’s Forbearance, it’s clear that the movie’s going to be a tragedy. Initially, the instigating event seems to be a divorce. Callie (Juli Tapken) has her papers prepared, and gets the lecture from her attorney not to let herself be sweet-talked out of it. But before she can bring herself to force the papers upon her asshole husband Travis (Josh Sunbury), he has a medical emergency. In that time-honored movie tradition, the one in which any character with a cough will probably be dead by the end of the film, he has stage 4 lung cancer. And making that diagnosis doubly scary, his doctor is Road Warrior and Commando villain Vernon Wells.
(Full disclosure: I’ve acted in two movies with Vernon Wells, and he’s a charming, fun guy. I wouldn’t want him to be the voice of my doomed diagnosis, though.)
Anyway, if the movie were about a jerk with cancer undergoing a divorce in his final months, that would certainly be a different sort of movie. Unsurprisingly, it’s not this one, either. No spoilers needed here, because things unfold exactly as a viewer might expect. My late friend, the National Review columnist Cathy Seipp, once wrote, “I just want you to know that cancer has not made me a better person.” Again, her story would be a different sort of movie, and certainly not this one.
But as many people online will tell you, it’s not fair to review the sort of movie that the one at hand is not. Review the one that it is. And it’s the country-song version: I’m an asshole, I’m sick, I’m drunk, I’m sorry, I’m nicer, I’m dead. Are you up for a whole movie of a guy coughing progressively more and more though each scene? The character rejects chemo, so this isn’t one of those where the lead actor had to starve – he gets extra gray eyeshadow and cheek hollowing makeup as the narrative moves along, but those are the only visual cues.
The movie is fond of montages of misery – moments where all diegetic sound drops out, and scenes of Travis and Callie being angry are cut together to score only. On the one hand, we arguably don’t need to hear exactly what they’re saying to get the gist. On the other, we get the only possible point pretty quickly.
Screenwriter Cedric Gegel, who also plays the lead couple’s estranged son (and does so effectively) is an actor and filmmaker who himself has survived cancer…in yet another true story that I dare suggest would be more interesting than the one actually being assessed here. The problem that a movie like Forbearance has to deal with right off the bat is that it must give audiences a reason to go on a journey they know will mostly have a predictably depressing trajectory. The initial divorce angle seems like it might be that, but from there a game cast goes through familiar terrain that has little new to say.
Sunbury’s great at being a jerk – though he’s in better physical shape than a real Travis might naturally be, he looks the part, and not like an actor pretending (save for the sick makeup, of course). Tapken gets forced into increasing histrionics as the film goes on, but plays best as a more exhausted wife who’s just gettin’ too old for this shit.
If a movie in the action or horror genre were as adequate as Forbearance, it’d be easier to give it a passing grade. Fair or not, a “cancer picture” has an uphill climb for viewers besides other cancer survivors and emotional masochists. What’s here is aggressively okay, but needs more to recommend it. Still, if the filmmakers ever want to do a spinoff centered on Vernon Wells as an ominous oncologist, I’m here for it.