The Humans
Stephen Karam (2021)
Stephen Karam’s one-act play The Humans played Off-Broadway in late 2015, moved to Broadway early the following year and won numerous accolades, including the Tony for Best (new) Play of 2016. As well as writing the script for this screen adaptation, Karam directed, too – all the more striking when he didn’t direct the play on stage and hadn’t made a film before. The Humans begins with exterior shots of a New York apartment block – from the ground looking up, and up. Changing camera angles create a disorienting effect and make the towering building formidable. Karam and his cinematographer Lol Crawley then move inside the apartment, where all the following action, save for a few subsequent shots of the street outside, will take place. The writer-director is evidently determined to avoid staginess and succeeds, but at a heavy price. The camera movement is conspicuous. The lack of light, made worse by the apartment’s dodgy wiring, is ominous. The combination upstages the title characters, who are often shot from a distance or in shadow (almost to suggest the ghosts of people who once inhabited the place). As a result, for this member of the audience anyway, they were sometimes hard to see and hear.
The Humans is obvious, for all that. Erik and Deirdre Blake (Richard Jenkins and Jayne Houdyshell, the only member of the Broadway cast in the film) arrive from Scranton, Pennsylvania (Stephen Karam’s native city) for a Thanksgiving dinner at the Lower Manhattan home of their younger daughter, Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), and her boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yeun). Accompanying Deirdre and Erik is his mother, Momo (June Squibb), who has advanced dementia. The Blakes’ elder daughter, Aimee (Amy Schumer), is also at the gathering. Brigid and Richard haven’t been in their apartment long – the place is hardly furnished or decorated, except for the dinner table and some fairy lights put up for the occasion. When, early in a film, someone enters a room and pensively runs their hand over a crack in the plaster, it’s a safe bet that the gesture portends relational fissures etc to be exposed in due course. This is just what Erik does on arrival at the apartment, and just what happens over the course of the remaining hundred or so minutes.
There are some nice bits of humour, mostly deriving from the generational differences and family traditions that Karam highlights. But The Humans turns into little more than a series of revelations of the characters’ flaws and miseries, chosen to illustrate typical stresses and challenges de nos jours. Deirdre is obese and Weight Watchers isn’t helping. Aimee, as well as suffering from ulcerative colitis, has recently lost her job with a law firm, and her girlfriend. While Brigid is a composer manqué, Richard is a long-serving mature student, who has suffered from depression. The confessional baton is passed from one character to another (except, of course, for Momo, who needs round-the-clock care that her son and daughter-in-law can’t afford). On the crucial anchor leg is Erik, who has been unfaithful to Deirdre, and lost his job and pension into the bargain. As is only to be expected, Richard Jenkins plays his part with particular distinction but the acting from all six cast members is close to impeccable. It’s hard to say much more about them than that, though: their roles are too clearly and narrowly defined for the actors to surprise.
Characters in The Humans sometimes talk about their dreams and what images in those dreams might signify. This interest in symbols makes you wonder why none of them seems to notice they’re trapped in an emphatically significant setting – a bleak house where lights fail, where disconcerting thumps and juddering sounds are repeatedly heard from somewhere in the bowels of the building. There’s even an ominous, unidentified figure glimpsed in the dark outside. By the closing stages, it’s inside that darkness reigns: another electrical failure leaves Erik whimpering fearfully as he struggles to make his way out of the apartment to join his wife and mother in the cab that will take them on their way home. He finally makes his exit into a sliver of light, closing the door behind him to leave the screen pitch black. This puts the seal on Stephen Karam’s glumly predictable film.
3 January 2022