Dan Levy is "Good Grief"

Inspired by the loss of his grandmother during the pandemic, Levy digs deep and the result is pure, raw and honest emotional artistry.

When did January become the month of grief?

Everywhere I look around, it’s smack dabbing me in the face.

Is it because in some parts of the world, it’s cold, snowy and it gets dark at 3pm and that this discomfort reminds us of our mortality?

Or perhaps because holiday celebrations are over and it’s time for us to get ripped (jargon for “in shape” or “fit”) and conjure up New Years’ resolutions which by default render us serious and contemplative?

Either way, the Type-A “bittersweet” quiet girl in me who knows grief well is vibing with it.

And I’m not the only one.

This week’s Substack from the THE

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

offers up poignant and incisive thoughts on the grief of loss:

Losing is inevitable. We can’t control that aspect of life. But we can control our preparation for it. We are all grieving from loss—whether the loss of people we love or hopes we had about our lives. We are all loners looking for shelter from the storm. Community is that shelter, which is why people belong to religions, book clubs, and pickleball groups. We seek the company of those with similar interests who might better understand us and therefore care about us.

I appreciate his acknowledging the multi-dimensionality of grief. It’s not something reserved simply for losing people but can flex a whole sphere of other events in our life including periods we long for, accomplishments that filled us with pride, and moments we look back at with nostalgia of a kind of other-worldly reverie.

And then there’s this very precise description of grief from Michelle Zauner, lead singer of Japanese Breakfast - one of my top 2022 new band discoveries - and a very skilled author of a bestselling book about losing her mother too young called “Crying in H Mart” which in the first two pages explained to me that H Mart is not K Mart for asian people, so there’s that:

Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

It’ll be 30 years next month since my mother passed away and reading these words is profoundly resonant. Zauner goes on to describe the jealousy and misdirected anger she often feels for older Korean women that look like how her mother might have looked had she lived long enough.

Every once in a while I, too, engage in this activity, entirely subconsciously, and often when I’m in a busy public place, like a mall. I’ll see a woman with short grey hair, small in stature, yet not diminutive with a dimpled cheek not unlike my own, and a broad forehead (also like me) and a square Slavic jaw, who would be my mom’s age and think maybe, just maybe she’d look like that - like that could be my mom.

When people die in their youth or before their expected expirations, they stay frozen in time. The moments of “what ifs” are simply your brain trying to encode a pattern for something that used to exist. It takes a long time for your brain to get the memo that this person has vanished physically from your life and every once in a while the wiring gets all tripped up. Grief is the very definition of your mind playing tricks on you, though I’ll take the cynicism down one notch to say it’s not ALL down to “faulty programming” though it kinda is.

Grief hits you in the damndest of ways and at the most inconvenient of times. This is the simple truth. And that anger and jealousy will eat you alive if you let it, just ask Dan Levy’s character in the film review I’m finally getting to.

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Good Grief is playing on Netflix

Grade: A+ (Daniel Levy knows how to bring an ensemble together in a way that celebrates the strengths of each actor. He never flaunts or showboats which I imagine given his talents is something he is intentional about. Plus, he has something insightful and well-constructed to say about grief. Soundtrack is Beth bliss. “Whiter Shade of Pale” is perfect, always.)

Levy wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film.

Avoiding Pain - Pushing Past The Grief Part

I am trying to train my brain to not feel so much in the next year to remind myself that I am not an orphan… and a widower. - Marcus (Dan Levy)

The premise of Good Grief is Dan Levy’s character, Marcus, is left reeling from the tragic death of his partner, Oliver (Luke Evans) on New Year’s Eve. Their life together, as witnessed in flashbacks and the party leading up to Oliver’s accident, presents as idyllic, with Oliver, a famous, wealthy writer and the more demonstrative of the couple, showering Marcus with love and affection at every turn.

There are cracks in the relationship as the year of mourning brings to the surface. We learn that Oliver pressed Marcus for an open marriage, something that translates to Oliver getting carte blanche to hook up with others while Marcus didn’t engage in the openness. In fact, as Marcus later admits in a heart-to-heart with Theo, a prospective lover, he didn’t really want those conditions, but fear kept him from saying this out loud - fear of losing Oliver, another type of grief. Geez, it’s everywhere!

The majority of the film centers around Marcus’s relationship with his close friends, a wild child with a self-destructive streak named Sophie (Ruth Negga, Preacher) and the more reserved, prickly Thomas (Himesh Patel, Yesterday) with a heart of gold. Both are nursing him out of his grief trying to be supportive friends and also distract him from the unpleasant feelings that come with being with-out a loved one.

Sophie gets him on a dating app at 6 mos post Oliver’s death though she can’t find a picture of him without his former husband and doesn’t want to Photoshop him out. She is also afraid of committing to her boyfriend and Thomas, Marcus’s ex is trying to find a boyfriend who wants to stay with him as he admits he’s never the one chosen. Hats off to Levy for making all of the characters rich and multi-faceted. In the same film with another director, Sophie could easily be reduced to a Manic Panic Pixie girl and Thomas, the pitied gay sidekick. This is not that. And it’s a good thing too because both Negga and Patel would be wasted on this.

Source: Roger Ebert.com / Marcus, Sophie and Thomas on New Years, a year later

The Raw Truth

Despite their very close relationship, Marcus shies away from real intimacy with Sophie and Thomas, opting against sharing his vulnerabilities, the ugly parts of his marriage, or even the presence of a potential new boyfriend. He doesn’t disclose the fact that Oliver intended to leave him for his new German boyfriend - something he wrote in a letter to Marcus and which Marcus only learned about at the year mark because in his grief, he couldn’t bring himself to open it before then.

In fact, the only character that Marcus can be real with in that whole year, is surprisingly Oliver’s estate lawyer, Imelda, played by the lovely Celia Imrie. It’s in those conversations with Imelda, an otherwise formal, stoic, and classic stiff upper lip Brit personality, where Marcus, given the space and silence, is able to explore his loss more openly and connect the dots between his identity as an orphan, and a widower. Later on, he is able to see how his guilt over choosing to be with Oliver instead of his ailing mother when she was sick, impacts him even now. Heck, perhaps Imelda is in some ways a maternal stand-in for Marcus. In any event, she gives him the gift of silence which leads Marcus to co-process the loss.

Play Video

Kym Dakin

discusses the importance of silence in building trust in a business context in her latest post:

In the same way that a musical score requires silence for emphasis and allows for deeper experience of the music, a working team can benefit greatly in “scoring some silence” into these business interactions.

The same can be said of people processing their grief in the company of others. It’s not that Marcus wants to deceive his friends by omitting details of his marriage. It’s that he can’t be entirely honest because his lies have protected him, shielded him from the pain of the truth.

We’ll Always Have Paris

At the half way mark of the film, Marcus takes his friends to Paris for the weekend to stay in a pied-a-terre that Oliver rented (presumably a love shack where he and the younger boyfriend could meet up)as a thank you gift for taking care of him. Sophie and Thomas think it’s a fun weekend away, no strings attached. For Marcus, the motives aren’t all that altruistic as he’s hoping to tease out Oliver’s malfeasance and experience first hand the double life he was living. Where the film could have leaned into more clickbait RHOBH moments, it healthily opts towards presenting human behavior as it really plays out when faced with a painful moment - distraction, running away from the problem and using anger as a catalyst for moving on. There are no bitch slaps at the table, even as the anticipated new boyfriend meeting moment transpires.

The trip has some climactic moments with the trio of friends lashing out at one another and inevitably finding their way back to one another. The standout of the film is a particularly well-executed bistro scene where Levy’s Marcus talks to his French quasi lover Theo and relays the heaviness of grief in such a poetic and wise manner that I wish I could find the standalone clip for you (it starts at :44 mins in). This scene alone raised the film from a mere A to an A+ in my estimation. But I’ll do you one better. I’ll give you the monologue which is America Ferreira Barbie-levels good:

I’ve been lying for a long time to a lot of people and it feels really heavy. Like, I’m swimming with my clothes on and I can’t take them off…I feel like I abandoned my mom when I met my husband - like I chose a distraction over sitting alone with her death or something. Didn’t take the time to grieve or live with the reality that she’s gone. I didn’t do that. I opted out. I stopped painting. Avoided doing things that reminded me of her even though all I wanted was to be reminded of her. I can feel myself doing the same thing with Oliver. I can feel myself choosing anger to distract from how much I miss him.

The inclusion of choice in this monologue is so powerful because while death doesn’t afford one control over its inevitability, we can opt in and choose to be present for loss and grief - and do so in the company of others.

Other Notable Audibles

From the Film:

Oliver’s Estate Lawyer, Imelda [on not dealing with the source of your pain and living a life of distractions]: “Because as it turns out to avoid sadness is to avoid love.”

Marcus’s Friend, Sophie [on moving on after losing someone]: “We built you a nest and sat on you for a like a year. It’s time to hatch, lovey.”

From the ‘Net - Intellectualizing Grief (my favorite):

From Maria Popova in “The Marginalian” and inspired by a current book I’m reading, “The Grieving Brain” which outlines the neuropsychology behind grieving:

I am speaking of the paradox inside the brain:

On the one hand, we lose people all the time — to death, to distance, to differences; from the brain’s point of view, these varieties of loss differ not by kind but only by degree, triggering the same neural circuitry, producing sorrow along a spectrum of intensity shaped by the level of closeness and the finality of the loss.

On the other hand, no person we have loved is ever fully gone. When they die or vanish, they are physically no longer present, but their personhood permeates our synapses with memories and habits of mind, saturates an all-pervading atmosphere of feeling we don’t just carry with us all the time but live and breathe inside

From Frances O’Connor, author of “The Grieving Brain”:

The brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one.

Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.

The Emotions of Grief:

From C.S. Lewis (author of the Narnia books and theologian), who lost his wife to cancer:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

Yes, this week’s BEVP was on a down beat, but I can also say that the topic of grief is one that can easily spill over to pages that could fill an endless # of anthologies and still not be enough. It’s fascinating and once you see it in things - even as pre-grief or the things we do in avoidance of the pain and discomfort loss brings, you can’t unsee it. To live without it would render all of us void of the joy that person, moment, or period in time ushered in for us and that would be the real shame. Then again, I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy*…playing Rachmaninoff.

*The real quote is “I'm also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” and it’s Julia Robert’s character, Anna Scott, in Notting Hill. I thought my version a step up.