‘Tangles’ Review: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson and Bryan Cranston Lead a Sweet, Sad, Slightly Generic Look at Dementia

Dementia has been palpably rendered on film a number of times this century, in varying tones and cadences. Michael Haneke’s wrenching Amour handles the subject with austere dispassion. Gaspar Noé’s Vortex amps up the stress to contrast the quiet and emptiness left in death’s wake. Florian Zeller artfully renders the near horror-movie disorientation of an afflicted man in The Father. And now the topic is addressed in an animated film, Tangles, about a daughter putting romance and career on pause to tend to her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother. 

Adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s 2010 graphic memoir, Tangles tells the story of Leavitt’s burgeoning life as a twenty-something in San Francisco — she has a promising illustrator job at a hip, queer alt-weekly and a sexy new love interest — suddenly interrupted by bad news from home. On a visit back to Maine, Sarah notices that her mother, Midge, is acting strangely. She’s moody, erratic, unfocused. Sarah’s family assumes it’s the onset of menopause, but Sarah suspects something far worse might be to blame. 

The film follows that dawning realization to an eventual diagnosis, and then wanders through the years after, as Midge slowly deteriorates and Sarah is torn between her obligations at home and the independent adulthood she had just begun fashioning for herself out West. That is a tension with which many audience members will be painfully familiar, the clash of duty and aspiration that gradually comes to inform many, if not most, filial relationships. 

Tangles is the feature debut of director Leah Nelson, who has the tricky task of balancing the film’s humor and sorrow. She tends to favor the lighter side; Tangles maintains its perky mien even as things for the Leavitt family get particularly difficult. Maybe I am just overly conditioned by the bleakness of past dementia dramas, but I craved a little more grit, some deeper pathos from this airy, amiable movie. 

Because this is a family-tragedy memoir based on a lesbian’s graphic memoir, it is hard not to compare Tangles to Alison Bechdel’s gorgeous, shattering Fun Home, which was adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical. Bechdel found achingly specific ways to capture the struggles she had with her father, and those he had with his sexuality. There’s an offbeat and yet plainspoken poetry to Bechdel’s depiction of how memories of life’s quotidian detail can register just as potently as significant, course-altering events.

Tangles, on the other hand, stays more surface-level. It hits the appropriate notes — of grief, of devotion, of gratitude in the face of loss — but it all feels almost theoretical, as if we are presented with the idea of those emotions rather than the emotions themselves. The film has a whiff of the generic, despite being so closely based on Leavitt’s actual experiences. The comedy, meanwhile, is amusing in a soft way, never quite laugh-out-loud funny but certainly never grating. It is not without its cliché, though, moments when the story could use a finer, more articulated texture.

Still, there is ample value to be found in this earnest, good-natured film. Midge is voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has a real forte for voice acting (well, acting in general, really). She’s terrific in the recent release The Sheep Detectives, and here endears us to Midge’s spunk and intellect and warmth, making it all the harder to watch her slip away. Abbi Jacobson is lively and empathetic as Sarah, while Bryan Cranston does his best dad work since Malcolm in the Middle. The production has attracted an impressive array of supporting talent, too: Seth Rogen (whose company co-produced the film), Sarah Silverman, Bowen Yang, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein, Wanda Sykes and Samira Wiley all lend their bright, distinctive voices to the film. 

Nelson and her team have thoughtfully given motion to what were once static images; the film looks lovely, its black-and-white pictures alternately cozy and forlorn. The film serves as a nice reminder that animation need not always be of the gleaming, plastic-y Pixar or Illumination varietals. Tangles is more bespoke and individual, though its animation is significantly altered — in scale and detail and shading — from what is found in Leavitt’s memoir. Perhaps that was the only way to make the film commercially viable, to place its visuals closer to what is commonly released in theaters. Still, Nelson has maintained at least some of the idiosyncratic spirit of Leavitt’s work. 

It is hard to recommend a movie about Alzheimer’s, something so sad and frightening to confront. But I would imagine that Tangles will prove cathartic to plenty of viewers who have lived through something similar, the film acting as a hand held out in support, comfort and understanding. Which is a perfectly worthy way for a film to exist, even if it does leave one wanting slightly bolder storytelling. I hope the movie finds the people who will be most receptive to its consoling kindness, those who perhaps don’t need a Euro auteur’s grand vision of what is, for so many, an everyday, entirely un-cinematic struggle.