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Much Ado About Dying review – brave, loving record of an actor uncle’s last days
Simon Chambers’ documentary is unsparing in capturing his theatrical relation’s endearing, sometimes desperate and often infuriating declineFilms about film-makers and their kith and kin sometimes get dismissed as self-serving, self-indulgent or even – everyone’s favourite smear word these days – narcissistic. Director Simon Chambers’s wrenching film about his relationship with his aged uncle David is none of those things; I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying. It’s the sort of thing you might call “raw” – in the sense that wounds are raw – but the craftsmanship is never raw, despite the obvious lack of budget.Chambers, mostly a voice narrating the story, and occasionally a presence on screen, explains how he was effectively summoned back to London from Delhi where he was making a film about cars. (The clips we see look promising and hopefully someday he’ll finish it.) He had to come home because his David, a former actor and schoolteacher, was struggling to cope with life alone. Practically housebound with a serious hoarding habit, David was not quite mentally or physically disabled enough to qualify for state intervention, but not really capable of taking care of himself either. Continue reading...
Simon Chambers’ documentary is unsparing in capturing his theatrical relation’s endearing, sometimes desperate and often infuriating decline
Films about film-makers and their kith and kin sometimes get dismissed as self-serving, self-indulgent or even – everyone’s favourite smear word these days – narcissistic. Director Simon Chambers’s wrenching film about his relationship with his aged uncle David is none of those things; I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying. It’s the sort of thing you might call “raw” – in the sense that wounds are raw – but the craftsmanship is never raw, despite the obvious lack of budget.
Chambers, mostly a voice narrating the story, and occasionally a presence on screen, explains how he was effectively summoned back to London from Delhi where he was making a film about cars. (The clips we see look promising and hopefully someday he’ll finish it.) He had to come home because his David, a former actor and schoolteacher, was struggling to cope with life alone. Practically housebound with a serious hoarding habit, David was not quite mentally or physically disabled enough to qualify for state intervention, but not really capable of taking care of himself either. Continue reading...
