‘Much Ado About Dying’ Review: The Challenges of Eldercare Laid Bare in a Candid, Close-to-the-Bone Doc
Back in the days before LGBTQ+ couples marrying and raising children was legal and relatively commonplace, the most tacitly homophobic characterization of homosexuality was as a “lonely lifestyle” — where queer community was seen as a rejection of family rather than another form of it, its members fated to die in their own arms. It was untrue then and even less true now, though even today, the stigma of non-nuclear family life endures, while child-free people of any sexuality get moues of sympathy when the subject of aging comes up. The challenges of eldercare outside traditional family structures, meanwhile, are sharply presented in Simon Chambers’ piercingly personal documentary “Much Ado About Dying,” in which the independent lives of two gay men, a generation apart, are entangled in the face of mortality.
“I think I may be dying.” It’s with this message — typically polite but offhand, as if dying isn’t the first thing on his mind — that long-retired actor David Newlyn Gale summons Chambers, his nephew and a shoestring documentarian shooting in India, to his bedside in a poky London studio. As it turns out, he is and he isn’t. Well into his eighties (“I’m aiming for 91, and will review when I get there,” he quips), David may have years left, but he’s in frail decline both physically and psychologically, holed up in an unsuitable apartment that he never leaves. Excessively stockpiled tins of soup provide his sole nourishment, a severe mouse infestation is dubiously treated with toothpaste squeezed along the skirting boards, while the cold is addressed with a dangerous surfeit of electric heaters that leave his skin alarmingly dry and scabbed.
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David lives this way in part because he’s incapable of better self-care, but also because he’s preoccupied with bigger ideas: At any given moment, his mind is more consumed with theater and music, poetry and sexuality, than tidying and budgeting. A gay man who only came out in his sixties, but who admits he cannot conceive of sharing a bed with someone else, he seems determined, in some sense, to make up for lost time by devoting his dotage purely to self-fulfillment — but even he recognizes that he can no longer get by alone. Rejecting offers of help from Chambers’ sisters, he places much stock in his and his nephew’s shared bond as single gay men, however different their priorities and outlooks in other respects.
That Chambers is a fellow artist, and one equipped with a camera to boot, is surely no secondary concern. An instinctive performer even in an everyday conversational context, David plays generously to Chambers’ lens as if giving some kind of testament to his own life: Never an especially famous actor, he is finally the star of his own devoted vehicle. Occasionally he masks his anguish behind other people’s words, delivering fiery Shakespearean readings like last-chance auditions for our attention, shot by Chambers in suitably intense, low-lit closeup.
But he’s no less compelling a presence when simply muddling through everyday obstacles in broad daylight, with droll humor and an occasionally short temper. He imperiously bosses his nephew with often ludicrous demands — a scene in which he demands to be dressed with his underpants hoiked impossibly high is a perfectly contained sketch of mundane comedy — while turning on the charm for his attentive immigrant neighbours, whose kindness turns to dependency when they move in with him, an already untenable living situation that worsens when freak disaster strikes. Though its focus remains unwaveringly intimate, “Much Ado About Dying’s” perspective quietly takes in a world of systemic inadequacies in the British care and welfare systems — as well as impossible barriers of privilege when David finally consents to a £1,000-a-week care home.
Amid the old man’s turmoil — and moments of joyous clarity, as when singing along to Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” — it’s Chambers’ churning sense of guilt and helplessness behind the camera that gives his film its conflicted, ever-heavier heart, alongside the fear that he may be documenting a preview of his own later years. A quiet, reserved figure who at one point claims to have “gone back into” the closet he left as a younger man, the filmmaker tends to his uncle’s maddening whims with a bittersweet empathy that borders on panic, as if investing the care in him that he hopes to receive from someone else one day. Death isn’t an ending in this achingly funny-sad film, just an anxiety passed between loved ones.
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