The powerhouse actresses play fragile women navigating a devastating diagnosis in this darkly comic story about the secrets that bind us. Toward the end of the deep-feeling, deliciously histrionic drama “Closing Night,” the film shifts tone. The first two acts — a whirlwind of long-deferred confrontations and fiery disclosures — lean on lively dark comedy as a pair of warring sisters explode with decades of rage and resentment.
Then the film slows its pace, doubling down on doleful sentimentality as it transitions into a more traditional tearjerker. The thrilling turbulence of the film’s start and middle make the total despondency at the end feel a little disappointing. But one can also understand why first-time feature director Cody Fern veered into such melancholic terrain.
An Australian actor (“American Horror Story”) who co-wrote the screenplay with Dylan Bostick, Fern is consciously working in a rich tradition of matrilineal melodrama. By zeroing in on fragile and anguished women, he positions his characters in a long lineage of cinematic heroines in extremis. Here, the emotionally besieged are Sandra (Sarah Paulson) and April (Naomi Watts), middle-aged sisters from Michigan who have been bitterly estranged since they were teenagers.
Sandra, who moved to Hollywood at 15, is a renowned actress of stage and screen. April is a hairdresser who never left home, and works at the beauty salon owned by their mercurial mother, Diane (Dianne Wiest). The source of the family’s hostility — which dates to immediately before Sandra decamped — is the film’s first major mystery, although it’s soon clear that it hinges on Theo (Toby Wallace), the son April raised on her own.
When the film begins, Sandra has extended an olive branch to April and Diane by inviting them to New York to see her perform on Broadway. Diane refuses, but April hesitantly makes the trip, only to learn that Theo — an artistic dilettante who lives in the city with his girlfriend, Lucy (Odessa A’zion) — has been lunching with Sandra behind her back. April receives the news as a betrayal.
But Theo, long kept in the dark about his mom and aunt’s rupture, sees the meetings as a chance to get to know the famous relative who was, until then, a stranger. There is an epic theatrical streak running through this family’s female line: a sense that, even in private moments, they imagine themselves cast under a spotlight. Fern establishes this mode during an early scene at the Broadway show, in which he cuts back and forth between Sandra’s line readings onstage and a furious exchange of stage whispers between April and Theo in the audience.
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