№ 802. The Big C

Screenrant

 

On “The Big C” Ms. Linney’s Cathy is almost refreshingly ordinary — a Minneapolis schoolteacher with a husband and child and a dull but comfortable life. Except, of course, that she too has a secret: melanoma.

The story begins after Cathy has been told she has a year to live. It is a tribute to Ms. Linney’s talent — and her body of work in movies like “Love Actually” and “The Savages” — that viewers don’t have to see for themselves that Cathy was a reserved, apologetic person before the diagnosis, the kind of dutiful worker bee who is easily silenced by stronger personalities. Ms. Linney makes it understood before uttering a word.

“The Big C” is framed as a comedy: Cathy’s imminent death sentence unleashes another, freer side of her. Suddenly, she is speaking up, except when she decides not to.

She doesn’t tell anyone about her cancer, not even her husband, Paul (Oliver Platt), or her son, Adam (Gabriel Basso), or her brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), a homeless ecology nut who lives out of Dumpsters.

Instead, Cathy tells people off — including a rude and hostile student, Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe from “Precious”), who is dangerously overweight; and a reclusive and sour neighbor, Marlene (Phyllis Somerville), who is unpleasant.

Casting off a lifetime of inhibitions, Cathy flirts with her doctor, smokes a cigarette, digs a swimming pool in her yard and, in restaurants, orders only drinks and dessert.

“The Big C” isn’t just about facing death, of course; it’s also about a woman who tries to live each day as if it were the last. The paradox of dealing playfully with a subject that is so taboo is that it’s easy to slide into safe comic clichés. In “Last Holiday,” Queen Latifah played a meek department store clerk who, when told she has a year to live, moves to a luxury hotel in Europe and savors life, delicious food and telling people exactly what she thinks. 

“The Big C” works because most of the writing is strong and believable, and so is Ms. Linney, who rarely sounds a false note and here has perfect pitch.

But perhaps because the subject is so challenging, the creators took some easy shortcuts in casting other characters. Mr. Platt as Paul is childish and egotistical and very much like the childish and egotistical husband he played in Nicole Holofcener’s recent film, “Please Give.” Before playing crusty, solitary Marlene, Ms. Somerville played crusty, solitary May in the movie “Little Children.”

Ms. Linney has the harder task of portraying the kind of reserved, reticent woman she has played in the past, but one who suddenly gets, as her brother puts it, “her weird back.”

It’s a credit to the actress, and the writers, that the weirder Cathy gets, the more likable she becomes.