Director: Michael Budd
Starring: Jane Seymour, Jacqueline McKenzie, Coco Jack Gillies, Stephen Hunter, Sam Rechner, Nicole Pastor, Michael Budd
Distributor: Other
Runtime: 116 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: Mild themes, violence and coarse language

This Australian drama follows three generations of strong women: grandchild, mother, and grandmother. It tackles the condition of clinical dementia, and secrets are shared in recollections and experiences that bring members of the family more closely together.

This Australian drama explores the condition of dementia, where memories of events – short-term, and/or long-term – slip out of conscious awareness, some, or all, never to return. The obliteration of recall that results from the condition can seriously affect human relationships. The film’s director, Michael Budd, was born in Australia and is of African-American descent. Budd draws from his own personal experience of working in aged and dementia care, and he lost his own grandmother to the condition.

The matriarch of the family under scrutiny is Ruby Seymour), who succumbs to dementia. She lives alone until she is no longer able to live independently, and moves into her daughter’s crowded home after burning her house down. Ruby’s teenage granddaughter – 16-year-old Tash (Coco Jack Gillies) – is forced to share her bedroom with Ruby. Tash had no real affection for Ruby until they shared life together after dementia struck. When that happened, the bond between them grew. The different stories and experiences that Ruby communicates are reinforced by the experiences that Ruby and Tash share together. McKenzie forcefully plays Sharon, mother of Tash; and Seymour dramatically plays Ruby.

The film is advertised to ‘open up the conversation on dementia’ but quality movies exist that give the condition special emphasis. Two powerful films about dementia stand out. The first is Still Alice (2014), and the second is The Father (2020). The treatment of dementia is clinically sound in both films; both powerfully demonstrate the loss that tragically affects conscious awareness, and they both examine the ways in which dementia destroys relationships. They are highly dramatic, tension-producing, and subtle in the inescapable escalation of the dementia that they illustrate. Still Alice covers memory loss for a married, professional woman; and The Father shows it for a proud, irascible, elderly man.

This film is different. The love between Tash and Ruby grows as Tash shares in the experiences of her grandmother, and the film requires Ruby to retain significant memories relatively intact. The film focuses on a ‘human perspective of living with the symptoms of the condition’. It emphasises love and compassion and family bonding, with compassion ultimately emerging as a major way of facing the challenges of the disease. Tash sees past the conflicts that surround Ruby to sense the emotions that lie behind Ruby’s sporadic recollections, and Tash’s love for Ruby increases as Ruby succumbs to her condition.

Importantly, the members of Ruby’s family learn to rediscover the value of Ruby’s presence in their midst. These are all positive, significant messages. This is a respectful, heart-warming movie that highlights the importance of love and support to enable people with dementia to live more active and meaningful lives. It is a little tricky that Ruby’s family finally respect her ‘choice’ (hence, the film’s title) to go into a particular aged care home, because she judges that she will like it.

Senile dementia is ‘a long goodbye’. This movie compellingly advocates that the experiences of dementia need to be imbedded in a context of genuine emotional connection, and compassionate treatment of someone who is afflicted with the disease. Treatment of the condition can signal emotional growth in the care-givers as well, giving them strength to move forward in their own lives. This is a film that conveys important emotional messages of this kind, that need to be much better understood. Its real punch, however, is the extraordinary bureaucracy that can surround officialdom’s efforts to make it look as if it really wants to help right now. The film’s exposition of bureaucracy and the stifling effect it can engender are fiercely telling.