After the marriage, Claire meets Josh and Olivia on a beach outing and makes a startling confession. She initiates it indirectly, by showing them photos that she’s been holding in a safe deposit box. It’s an odd place to keep one’s past, but Claire has very good reason to have hidden hers.
Not only is the beloved matriarch not a Jew, she was herself a member of the Nazi Party in World War II Germany.
Claire, who remains an anti-Semite but nevertheless also continues to insist that she loves her Jewish children, has brain cancer. She wishes to travel out of New York for an assisted suicide. Some of her family members believe her life deserves a different resolution: They’d like to see her make restitution for her deceptions.
This is not a thoroughly polished movie. Its look has a high-end video sheen that, combined with the mostly flat lighting, is somehow more neutral than what the material warrants. The sound mixing is odd, too. There’s a scene in which Olivia speaks to Josh on a cellphone, and he sounds as if he’s standing directly next to her.
Still: the harrowing outlandishness of the dramatic situation is almost sufficient to emotionally concuss the viewer. And the movie is quite accomplished in the most important respects. Its peculiar rhythms, in which certain characters conduct nearly uninterrupted monologues of over 10 minutes, seem entirely deliberate, as does the sometimes plain affect of the performers.
As the impossible Claire, longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them. The movie’s finale is both satisfying and shame-inducing about their situation, which is wholly apt.
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‘The Last’
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.