There’s a Jewish phrase that people often say after someone dies: “May their memory be a blessing.”This can mean different things to different people. However, it is meant to be an active remembrance and a way of honoring and extending the virtues of the deceased. Ondi Timoner’s deeply moving documentary, “Last Flight Home,”This phrase is used at the end. Each scene is a good example of its many meaningful facets.
Timoner’s films — including two Sundance Grand Jury Prize winners, “Dig!” “We Live in Public” — tend to be searching and intense, but none have ever dug more deeply than this one. Eli, her father, was 93 years old and had been failing rapidly. He declared last year that he wanted his life to end on his own terms. California, his home state, has a Death with Dignity Law that allowed him to make the decision under certain conditions. The first of these was a 15-day waiting period — and this is the time Timoner records.
Whereas documentarian Kirsten Johnson took a high-concept approach to her father’s decline in 2020’s Sundance standout “Dick Johnson Is Dead,”Timoner employs a simple, straightforward approach. She sets up a camera in her parent’s living room, where her father is resting in a hospital bed and her mother is silently worrying on the couch. Then she starts to count down the days.
The family recalls their lives together on Day 15. Through faded photos and old home movies, Eli and Lisa are a beautiful couple with three young children. Eli founded Air Florida in 1972, and Timoner shows us in a range of ways that the company’s motto — “Fly a Little Kindness” — reflected Eli’s lifelong personal ethos.
He was a fundraiser and philanthropist for many important causes. We learn from former employees that he tried to treat all his employees with equal respect. While Eli and Lisa are open to discussing financial hardships, their daughter tends to focus on the positive. If there were rifts among this tightly-knit clan, we don’t hear about them. And here, it feels right: This is a movie about the impact of one man’s life, and Ondi’s father remains, until the end, a remarkably sanguine force.
On Day 12, the family and their heroic hospice nurse begin to assess the practicalities of Eli’s coming death, lining up doctors and discussing medications. A draft of his obituary is given to Eli on Day 7 and a meeting with a doula on Day 5 is set up. On Day 2, his grandsons go into his closet to pick out the ties they’re going to wear to his funeral.
If this sounds unbearably sad, well — let’s just say it’s probably for the best that you can see this movie in the privacy of your own home, with a very large box of tissues close at hand.
But it’s Eli who really defines the tone, and it is revelatory to watch the way he handles this most human, and humbling, of experiences. He cannot get out of bed, or speak with strength. But he’s not sad or bitter or even scared. He is simply grateful that he has the ability to decide when and how he will spend his final days. He Zooms with his old colleagues and friends, who share stories about business meetings and tennis games, and it is easy to see how fleeting moments can create memories. When he prays with Ondi’s sister Rachel, a Rabbi, we witness firsthand the value of generational rituals.
He tells his wife in pain that he is going to Heaven and will be there with his family. “make some kind of a protective shield around your lives.”However, his family is first to do the exact same thing for him.
Eli responds to a question from one of his grandsons about how to live well. “Start off with respect for the people you don’t know, and love for the people you do know.” “Last Flight Home”It is the outcome of a life lived according to this standard. The Timoners’ tiny living room is so overflowing with love for Eli that we can almost see a physical cloak of gratitude, respect and affection surrounding him at all times.
He remains a proud liberal until the end, but despite the controversial nature of California’s End of Life legislation, Ondi never explicitly injects politics into the film (though there is a very sweet cameo from Rachel Maddow). She doesn’t need to. It’s hard to imagine anyone judging Eli for choosing, as Ondi says, “to be thoughtful and conscious about his departure.” She also notes with gratitude that this choice is a luxury many others never get, a point underscored by his visitors’ ever-present pandemic masks.
Timoner’s films are always entertaining or engaging but they also start with an irresistible hook, like badly-behaved rock stars (“DIG!”) or hard-living artists (“Brand: A Second Coming,”The biopic “Mapplethorpe”). This is where she draws upon her skills and experience to tell the simple story of a man who lived quietly as a loving husband and friend. It is simple in its simplicity, yet it is honest and heartbreakingly human. “Last Flight Home”Eli Timoner has been blessed.
“Last Flight Home”It will be shown for the first time at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.