Mark Reviews Movies: TAMMY'S ALWAYS DYING

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 30, 2020

Even the most unthinkable things can become normal with enough experience. Take the case of Catherine MacDonald (Anastasia Phillips) in Tammy's Always Dying. At the end of every month, for who knows how long, she has to retrieve her mother Tammy (Felicity Huffman) from a bridge near the mother's house.

Tammy is threatening suicide, because the money and the food and the booze run out by the end of the month (A smartly minimalist montage later shows the supplies dwindling as the days pass). "No one helps me," she cries to her daughter, who's standing right there, talking Tammy down from the edge and ready to take her mother out for breakfast.

This is the norm for Catherine, because she has known nothing else and stopped thinking about some next stage in her life a while ago. She works at a local bar, run by Doug (Clark Johnson), the closest Catherine or Tammy has to a genuine friend. Every Sunday, Catherine and Doug escape to the city to a hotel bar, dressed up and pretending to be rich, successful, and happy people. She's also having an affair with her now-married ex-boyfriend. All of this normal for Catherine, and barring some massive change, it's going to be her constant normal for the rest of her life.

The film, written by Joanne Sarazen and directed by Amy Jo Johnson, is grim in its story, its look, and even its humor. The main plot provides a macabre irony to Tammy's situation, when she learns she has cancer. Despite her initial decision to decline any kind of treatment, Catherine agrees to help her through chemotherapy. The additional layer of twisted irony is that Catherine, who takes some comfort knowing that her psychologically abusive mother isn't long for this world, slowly helps Tammy's medical prospects significantly improve.

Through a subplot involving Catherine trying to get on a daytime talk show, Sarazen's screenplay cleverly comments upon the morbid fascination with tales of poverty and misery. The film itself evades such simplification, because Johnson's approach is simply to find sympathy for all of these characters—as much as they might not want or deserve it.

That might not seem like much, but it is. This dedication to seeing these people through a lens of understanding and basic respect makes Tammy's Always Dying an appropriately messy study of the complexity of these characters and their relationships.

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