“Familiar Touch” Is an Exquisitely Fragmentary Portrait of Memory Loss

We all have our distinct cinematic pressure points, specific kinds of images that trigger a burst of squeamishness. I instinctively cover my eyes whenever I see a character chopping food in haste, which often portends a painful slip of the knife. In the quietly wrenching new movie “Familiar Touch,” Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant), a woman in her eighties who has dementia, shows off some skillful, unhurried, happily accident-free knife work, trimming fresh dill for sandwiches in one scene, and slicing grapefruit for a fruit salad in another. I tensed up anyway, briefly fearing that the film’s director and screenwriter, Sarah Friedland, would seize on these moments to emphasize Ruth’s vulnerability, her loss of mental acuity or physical control. Thankfully, no. Friedland isn’t a sadist, and Ruth is a retired cook, with a lifetime’s worth of culinary mastery that does not yield easily to the erosions of age. Amid so many fast-fading memories, food offers a rare and sustaining foothold.

Ruth prepares those sandwiches, early on, for herself and her son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin). By this point, she has forgotten that his name is Steve, that he’s her son, and that she even has a son. Steve’s sad, stoic expression suggests that he has grown used to being treated as a stranger. This lunch is the last meal they will share together in Ruth’s house, in Los Angeles. After they finish eating, Steve drives her to Bella Vista, an upscale assisted-living facility that, as he gently reminds her, she picked out some time ago. Ruth’s responses to these (for her) surprising developments seem to obscure as much as they reveal: Are we catching glimpses of the woman she once was, or of a woman she once dreamed of becoming? Thinking that Steve is taking her on a date, she responds with a bit of wink-wink ribaldry that makes him briefly uncomfortable. When he finally shatters the spell and calls her “Mom,” she not only denies being his mother but also insists that she never wanted children. Vaguely grasping—and perhaps resenting—that she is being moved into a new home, she purses her lips, avoids eye contact, and tells Steve to get going: “I would like you to be unconcerned,” she says, with a steely resolve that seems to arise from deep within. Here, we sense, is a woman accustomed to, and now being deprived of, her self-sufficiency.

What does Ruth know, and when does she know it? This is the question that hums away beneath every scene of “Familiar Touch,” and it infuses the serene, fine-grained surfaces of Chalfant’s performance with an extraordinary element of mystery. A simple expression of puzzlement takes on layers of possible meaning; a confused frown can fight a knowing smile to a draw. Adjusting to life at Bella Vista, Ruth can be snappish, but she is quick to temper her irritability with kindness. She is also highly adaptable: when a certified nursing assistant, Vanessa (wonderfully played by Carolyn Michelle), slyly cajoles her into taking her medication, Ruth relents with a warmth and playfulness of her own. At times, she seems to regard her new situation, rightly, as an adventure, with ample room for exploration and role play, and she throws herself into it with a lucidity that seems, for now, to overpower her confusion. In the film’s most delightful sequence, Ruth, spying an opportunity to be useful, strides into the kitchen during breakfast prep, dons an apron, and insists on doing a shift. The workers, though surprised, kindly accommodate her, with what feels like practiced readiness. Here and elsewhere, the film becomes as much a portrait of everyday life at Bella Vista as it is of Ruth herself.

Friedland underscores this by continually situating Ruth within large groups, filmed in stationary long shots by the cinematographer Gabe C. Elder. At times, it takes a while to find her, waiting at a table in the dining room, or sitting with other residents during a recreational activity that involves virtual-reality headsets. “Familiar Touch” was shot at Villa Gardens, a retirement community in Pasadena, and conceived in close collaboration with the center’s residents and care workers, some of whom appear as background players. (According to the film’s production notes, residents also participated in various behind-the-scenes roles, including production design, casting, and camerawork.) It’s fitting, then, that what passes onscreen between Ruth and her caregivers is a wry spirit of collaborative improvisation, as if the characters themselves were taking part in an acting exercise. During an interaction with the home’s friendly director of health and wellness, a man named Brian (Andy McQueen), Ruth murmurs, knowingly, “I need to play the patient, and you play the doctor.” The giving and receiving of care is shown to be enriched, on both sides, by flexibility, creativity, humor, and a measure of make-believe.

For all these intimate gray zones, “Familiar Touch” is, unambiguously, a portrait of decline—a process that the story tracks, in part, through Ruth’s growing struggle with banal everyday activities. Early on, she’s at home, rifling through a closet for something to wear—a search that consciously evokes the inner workings of memory—and eventually dressing herself, elegantly and with no apparent difficulty. Later, at Bella Vista, Vanessa, who has come to regard Ruth with daughterly affection, has to help extricate her from a tightly buttoned top. By the end, Ruth sits quietly in her room, waiting as another worker gently pulls a shirt over her head. The worker is wearing a face mask, the first one we’ve seen, which grimly suggests that the pandemic is under way—and leaves us to wonder, with little optimism, what will become of Ruth and her fellow-residents in the terrible months ahead.

So why endure this movie? Certainly not for novelty’s sake; we are hardly starved for dramas of mental decay, or for the stupendous feats of acting that are often achieved in their service. But “Familiar Touch,” its title perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect. Unlike, say, “Away from Her” (2007) or “Still Alice” (2014), Friedland’s movie does not lean too heavily on a family member’s helpless gaze; Steve is a sympathetic but peripheral presence, and Ruth’s journey remains a painfully solitary one. And unlike “The Father” (2020), the most prominent and lauded of recent films in this vein, “Familiar Touch” does not employ the syntax of a thriller in order to strand us in the labyrinth of a patient’s damaged, distorted consciousness. Friedland, working in a spare, disciplined style, has set herself a trickier challenge: she seeks to convey Ruth’s psychological interiority through rigorously external means.

She also photographs her characters’ hands with particular care and attentiveness. It’s clear from the title and the beginning of the film—when Ruth opens her palm expectantly, waiting for Steve to take hold of her hand—that human touch will be a resonant motif. As verbal conversation becomes increasingly challenging, the sensation of a reassuring hand on Ruth’s back—or the feel of a swim trainer’s arms, gently supporting her in the water—may communicate more profoundly than words can. If the film has a tragic turning point, it’s a silent, beautifully sombre moment in which Ruth, seated in an exam room, gently touches her hands to her chest, as though trying to simulate someone else’s touch—and cling, for just a second longer, to another fast-fading memory. No wonder the taste and the tactility of food continue to mean so much to her; no wonder she steals out one night for the simple pleasure of a grocery run, and the feel of fresh produce in her hands.

As “Familiar Touch” proceeds, it seems to empty out: of conversation, of characters, and even of fully formed scenes. The editing, by Aacharee (Ohm) Ungsriwong, takes an elliptical turn, as if Ruth’s mind and memory were no longer capable of registering more than a few fragments at a time. We feel, in her stiffening posture and hollowed-out gaze, a woman’s incremental, helpless withdrawal from the world around her, and it’s devastating to behold. But devastation is only the culmination, and not the entirety, of Ruth’s journey, and Chalfant’s performance, for all its exquisite subtlety, is also furiously alive. Over the course of the movie, Ruth’s cognitive limitations give rise to a dynamic range of emotional expression: when she bosses people around the kitchen at Bella Vista, or regales Brian mid-examination with an unsolicited recipe for borscht, you see a woman in open, even exuberant defiance of the end that she knows awaits her. This is a rare leading film role for Chalfant, a veteran actor best known for her theatre work, and it instills, among other things, a powerful desire to see her in more—and to find, after Friedland, another filmmaker whose sensitivity of touch matches her own. ♦