Perhaps it is more realistic that their relationship is brief and reaches the conclusion it does, but the world within the film is so bleak that it would be nice to have some hope somewhere.Įzer shoulders the difficult subject matter and representation issues with finesse and grace, but the film falls in line with others of its kind. The thread about Lucy’s father is shifted somewhat to the background to make room for romance. It is weakest when it forces Mara and Page together in a romance that Mara’s character doesn’t want, even though it is something for which Page’s character yearns. The performances are genuine, and Charlie Shotwell is particularly endearing too young to understand why their father refuses to see him. My Days of Mercy is strongest when Lucy is interacting with her family. God forbid a lesbian relationship ever end happily! It may have been the right decision for the tone of the film, but is it too much to ask for once that an LGBTQIA+ romance is not merely a brief, intimate, but ultimately doomed encounter? The relationship is all Lucy has, so it almost feels as though Mercy is using Lucy to explore a side of herself which she keeps hidden from her parents. However, the film somehow frames Mara as the sexually confident woman, seducing Page, until she returns to her white bread world across the country. In addition, any time an LGBTQIA+ relationship is shown on screen but not part of the plot itself is a step forward in representation. Although credit must go to Ezer for handling a lesbian love story far better than many filmmakers before her. Mara, on the other hand, is heartless and very hard to like. Ellen Page is, as always, the blend of shy and ‘gives-no-fucks’ that we have grown to love since Juno. Yet juxtaposed with this is the love story between our two main characters. Everyone knows a story like Mercy’s and a story like Lucy’s, and each is given a chance to voice their thoughts and feelings without immediate judgement- something that is rare in the onslaught of American crime dramas Netflix keeps pumping out. The concept of capital punishment is a difficult issue, and Ezer neatly balances the two sides of the argument, personified by Mercy and Lucy respectively. Israeli director Tali Shalom-Ezer paints an effective portrait of a working-class American family which is nicely juxtaposed with the middle-class world to which Mercy belongs. The siblings live in the house where their mother was murdered and share a laptop between them. Lucy and her family live in a tiny town which everyone is scrambling to run away from, a trope seen in everything from Ladybird to Beautiful Creatures. Unfortunately, at times, My Days of Mercy suffers from this problem. But there comes a point when it detracts from the subject matter. There is a current trend in independent film-making to shoot much of the film with a shaky, unsteady hand to perhaps emphasise the messiness of reality. It is a bleak – bordering on hopeless – journey of life, death, and love. It is at one of these events that she meets Mercy (Kate Mara), a young woman who is on the other side of the argument. Her elder sister Martha (Amy Seimetz) drags her and their younger brother, Ben (Charlie Shotwell), to executions at prisons all across the country to protest against capital punishment. The central character is Lucy (Ellen Page), a young, lost woman whose father is on death row for killing her mother. My Days Of Mercy is a tender yet harrowing drama that, despite its serious subject matter, works through tired tropes of contemporary cinema, both in style and substance.
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