Much Ado About Dying

The title of Simon Chambers’ documentary showing at IDFA recalls one Shakespeare play but in the film itself it is another, King Lear, that is called upon again and again. That comes down to the man at the centre, David Gale, a former actor who, in one scene, says he never got the chance to play Lear but could have been a good one.

Well, he is this sad, funny, and tender film’s King Lear. It may not be Shakespeare but it is a wonderfully realised project and a masterpiece of the family-filming-family subgenre. First, Chambers takes us through his own life as a bit of a roving man seeking a story. He is in India filming what is supposed to be a documentary on cars when his elderly uncle David calls him. He believes he’s dying. He could call Chambers’ sisters—they are geographically closer to him—but, as he says, they are “bossy”. This is the first indication of the sort of person David, as Chambers calls him, is. And it is because of David’s lively ways on camera that this documentary should find home in any festival with an adult audience. Rights buyers looking for films for a wide range of ages, except for the very young, should also take a look at this intimate masterwork.

Chambers does return to London and heads to his uncle’s flat. The man is not actually dying—he does quite a dance with his upper body and flapping arms—but he is in a bad shape. His flat is even worse. One of his brilliant moves involves squirting his sockets with toothpaste because he learned rats are not great fans of mint. Chambers gets out his camera and begins filming the old man. He says the old man never feels more alive than when he has an audience to perform for. But maybe the other side of that claim is that Chambers himself feels best handling a camera. Both men do seem similar: they are both men of a certain age without women, a detail that has Chambers remarks upon in his achingly great voiceover while discussing his uncle and his own queerness.

David explains the difficulty of finding a partner at a time when the world was significantly more hostile to queerness than today. In one graphic narration, he recalls the conflicting emotions involved in one of his first encounters. As he puts it, the session was both frank and lovely. When he exclaimed, “I love this man”, his lover asked him not to say such a thing unless he meant it. Chambers, one presumes, doesn’t have a worry of the same size, but he is just as alone. The self-awareness brought about by caring for his uncle leads him to question his own loneliness. Maybe that is the price to pay for the freedom he and his uncle have earned by the actions (and perhaps inactions) of their youth.

Soon enough, that need for freedom shows up again. Not for David—he no longer has that privilege; in fact, he has found unlikely soulmates in a neighbouring couple. It is Chambers who begins to worry about having his life chained to this old man whose flat is crammed with books and who has King Lear in his face on several occasions. Maybe he is the fictional king’s fool, he wonders.

Maybe he is. He plays the role admirably, even when he is obviously stressed by the king’s demands. Maybe that is a small price to pay given the results of the many years of filming. But, of course, it isn’t just him. Chambers’ co-editor, Claire Ferguson, gets what must have been endless footage into this flowing paean to life and death. Some of the seamlessness of what she produces are veritable miracles.

But the person who holds it all together is the witty, cantankerous, jovial dying man named David Gale. He is charismatic and, for quite a while, unkillable: his flat burns, his urethra blocks, he needs a walking stick. But he survives everything. It is cancer that at last gets him. But even so, you get the feeling that, like Rabbit Angstrom, the character from the John Updike novel that lies by David’s bedside, “dead” isn’t quite the adjective. David doesn’t die. He is at rest.