Mark Reviews Movies: SWAN SONG (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 16, 2021

Writer/director Benjamin Cleary's Swan Song is a movie with a Big Idea that doesn't quite know what to do with it. The idea, possible but rare within the story's futuristic setting, involves cloning. An experimental procedure allows a person to be cloned, and when it becomes necessary, the clone takes over that person's life.

The necessity under these circumstances is that person's impending death. That's the state of our protagonist, an artist named Cameron (Mahershala Ali), who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. When he dies, he will leave behind a pregnant wife and a young son. If he can spare them that pain and the uncertainty of a future without him, Cameron isn't rejecting that possibility.

He isn't exactly enthusiastic about it, either. That's the tension of Cleary's screenplay and Ali's performance, which certainly elevates the dread and melancholy of a story that gradually becomes more about its emotional elements than its potential ideas. That approach works to a certain degree, especially as the story reaches its inevitable climax, but there's little denying that Cleary leaves a lot of promising possibilities underdeveloped or unexplored.

We meet Cameron, who is dying of an unspecified degenerative disease and keeps that information from his wife Poppy (Naomie Harris, doing a lot with a role that's more an ideal than a character). She's two-months pregnant and misinterprets her husband's fear of leaving his family behind for uncertainty about having another child. To be clear, he will be leaving behind Poppy and their son Cory (Dax Rey), either because he dies while he's still with them or because he has been replaced by an exact duplicate, with all of his physical features and memories.

There's a solid moral debate to be had in this premise: whether it's better to spare loved ones by way of a lie or to be honest and guarantee grief. None of that is really addressed here, as Cameron enlists the aid of Dr. Jo Scott (Glenn Close), who promises a perfect clone and smooth transition into his family's continuing life, unaware of the presence of Cameron's duplicate. The actual debate is whether or not Cameron can accept his mortality.

All of that rests on Ali's shoulders, and the actor, who is one of the best currently working and given his first leading role in a movie, is predictably up to the tricky task—not only because of the severity of the character's struggle, but also because Cleary's screenplay operates in fairly inexact terms. A good portion of the story and the characterizations exist in assorted flashbacks, broadly giving us a sense of Cameron and Poppy's relationship (They meet cute—twice—on a train, and scenes of domestic bliss and deep grief play out in montage or short vignettes). On a story level, such moments give us a general feeling of a generically sweet and occasionally troubled marriage, but they definitely don't establish the sense of loss and tragedy with which the story will ultimately have to deal.

On a plot level, there's a more foundational need for these flashbacks. Cameron is passing along his memories to his clone, whom the doctor dubs "Jack" (also played Ali with some admirably subtle personality changes, since Cleary ensures the doubles' costumes are color-coded for clarity). When Jack awakens from this process of memory-transference, he will be an exact copy of Cameron.

The possibilities here are seemingly endless, and Cleary touches upon some of the more intriguing ones, such as a scene in which Cameron lies about what he wants from this process and Jack, who almost knows Cameron better than he knows or is willing to admit about himself, calls him out on the deception. Basically, Cameron says he wants to keep his family from experiencing his death, but what he wants in reality is an escape for himself—one that, as soon as it becomes clear that Jack is his own body and consciousness removed from Cameron, the clone will only provide for Poppy, his son, and his future child.

That's the rub of this process, as explained by the doctor and lived by Kate (Awkwafina), one of only two people who have been replaced before Cameron. She, too, is dying, and in her calm acceptance of that fact and of being replaced by her own double, she has a perspective that Cameron has yet to gain. It's a sort of promise—that Cameron will find some comfort and meaning in sacrificing the knowledge of his death for his family. There's a lot to this sort of faith in the capacity for such acceptance. It's more than a little frustrating, then, that Cleary diminishes this connection and the potential conversations to be had, in favor of the two doomed people speaking in sentiments and joking with each other.

Here is a movie made up of a few generally effective moments (The climax is pure emotional manipulation, but Ali, in his dual roles, makes it work) and many more that point toward what this story could have been. There's much more to Swan Song than Cleary seems to realize, unfortunately.

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