A family grown apart checks in with each other in The Humans, Stephen Karam’s film version of his Tony Award-winning play. The family, living their separate lives, hasn’t gotten together for a while and it turns out that each member has experienced a significant life event.
The occasion is the first time the youngest daughter (Beanie Feldstein) has hosted a holiday dinner. She and her partner (Steven Yuen) have just moved into a decrepit apartment in NYC’s Chinatown and haven’t finished unpacking.
Her taciturn dad (Richard Jenkins,) and no-bullshit mom (Jayne Houdyshell) have brought the senile grandma (June Squibb), and her lawyer sister (Amy Schumer) shows up, too.
Deadpan humor results from the young’s couple’s blissful obliviousness to how hopelessly dilapidated the apartment is. They are embracing NYC charm but are choosing to overlook the stained and chipped tiles, exposed pipes and wiring, ancient fuse box, and the excruciatingly slow, tiny elevator adorned with male appendage graffiti. The parents and sister take it all in with polite silence.
There are also, of course, the eye-rolling moments of parent-adult child interactions and the well-known quirks of each family member. This all sounds like familiar movie fodder, but The Humans is NOT AT ALL sit-commy.
Big, life-changing things have happened to each family member, and they are about to be revealed. There’s the whispered admonition “Don’t wait until after dinner.” If you need to see a family that should be more depressing than yours, this is your movie.
The Humans was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play.While off-Broadway, the script won the 2016 Obie Awards for Karam’s playwriting and Houdyshell’s performance.
The entire cast is excellent, especially Houdyshell and Jenkins.
The Humans must be the least stagey movie set completely in one apartment. The playwright Karam really uses cinema – this is not a theater performance on video. The camera stares at the apartment’s flaws, and the apartment becomes the seventh character. We hear dialogue off camera – some is atmospheric and some is important and revealing.
The Humans moves from wry to shattering as it authentically probes how we accept our failings and those of our loved ones – or not.