Film Review: A Stage of Twilight
An Intimate, Emotional Film Featuring Two Brilliant Performances
A human life is a precious thing; the Buddha said that a human birth is as rare as a blind turtle alighting from the water into a drifting, golden hoop.
What, then, are our obligations when a human life, inevitably, comes to its end? Is the choice to end one’s life to avoid suffering permissible? Must that decision take into the account the wishes of others?
These difficult questions are at the heart of Sarah Schwab’s independent film “A Stage of Twilight” which saw a theatrical premiere at Buffalo’s North Park Theater on April 19, 2024. It has earned high praise on the film festival circuit and is preparing for digital distribution later this month.
A Stage of Twilight
The film is set at the end of the long, happy marriage of Cora (Karen Allen) and Barry (William Sadler). When Barry is told that his advanced, congestive heart failure has doomed him to but a few short weeks of remaining life, he decides to isolate himself to spare Cora the pain of his death, a decision that his wife doesn’t support.
Despite Cora’s feelings of betrayal and bewilderment (“he is going to slink off and die like a cat”), Barry spends his last days making arrangements for Cora’s needs, ignoring her heart-rendering pleas to end their days together.
The poignancy attached to Barry’s end-of-life decisions is amplified by the couple’s interactions with a teenaged, surrogate son facing a critical decision about his future. It is here that the otherwise brisk pacing lags, as questionable subplots involving a love triangle and drug use drag the story from its powerful center.
That said, the supporting performances are solid, especially Marlon Quijije who plays Joey, Barry and Cora’s neighbor struggling with the complex demands of adulthood.
Writer and Director Sarah Schwab (SUNY Fredonia) wisely turns “A Stage of Twilight” over to its leading actors, whose powerful, on-screen chemistry and sublime performances deliver plaintive humanity without crossing into sentimentality or melodrama.
Independent Film Today
It is hard to imagine “A Stage of Twilight,” starring two actors in their 70s, being made by a Hollywood studio.
As discussed in this space, the bulk of films currently under theatrical and digital distribution are calculated to become profitable “installments” in a “cinematic universe” that can be leveraged for profitability in international markets, video games, and merchandising.
Thus, in order to answer the corporate demand for short-term profits, film studios generally tell the same stories with same characters until the profits dry up.
This is nothing new. The 1970s Golden Age of Movies (Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg) was a bloated studio system’s survival response. I quote film critic Ann Hornaday’s excellent analysis.
A half a century ago, Hollywood was on the brink of potential extinction, brought on by stodgy, big-budget bombs, competition from television and a calcified production system unprepared to meet the expectations of a new, younger market. Thanks to sheer desperation and resourceful responses to it, the ensuing decade came to be known as one of the most creatively rich eras in American cinema.
I can only hope that, as in the 1970s, the current corporate practice of movie-making as media strategy collapses under the weight of its own greed. New voices, like Sarah Schwab’s, deserve to be heard.
“A Stage of Twilight” raises complex issues of moral agency in death. Other movies have dealt with these themes, such as “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” (1981) and “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), but none have done so with such intimacy and resonance.
Cora and Barry give powerful expression to the pathos of ordinary lives approaching death’s murky veil. “A Stage of Twilight,” like life itself, will break your heart.
This is the most postive prediction of the film industry I have heard. Thank you!