Last Flight Home Review: Ondi Timoner’s Uninquisitive Act of Self-Surveillance

While the raw material of director Ondi Timoner’s Last Flight Home is wrenching and affecting, chronicling as it does her father Eli’s last 15 days of life after he asks for an assisted suicide afforded by California’s End of Life Option Act, it stops short of ever questioning its own presentation. “There’s no rehearsing this,” a nurse remarks to the family at one point regarding the administration of assisted suicide drugs. But clearly, as seen in the first season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO show The Rehearsal, there conceivably is.

Though Fielder’s series hasn’t taken up the issue of assisted suicide, it consistently operates from the premise that documentaries, like narrative features, are always the work of filmmakers with agendas, hang-ups, and perspectives. Fielder explores this idea in contemporary settings, but it isn’t a new one, as it can be traced back to at least Jean Rouch writing about the relationship between the camera and the documentarian in the 1950s. Fielder knows that, and he implicitly asks documentarians to be more forthcoming about their presence in the filmmaking process, if not necessarily to the lengths that he goes to.

Last Flight Home, though, is a straightforward case of a documentary that would prefer to leave such facts unspoken. As what amounts to, essentially, a home movie about Eli’s legacy and the logistics of death, the film exploits the circumstances surrounding his assisted suicide for little discernible purpose beyond the value of any home movie: the recording of private moments for future viewing by those who are either in the footage or by those who know the people in it.

Since most viewers will fit into neither of those categories, Last Flight Home unfolds under the auspices of empathy, as the film assumes that its warm-hearted portrait of Eli as a liberal, hard-working father who was unjustly stripped of his stature and pride when he was suddenly paralyzed will resonate as a spiritually recuperative gesture. And it could conceivably accomplish this if the film were fully about his life and not insistent on documenting his death. Instead, this context is utilized as a means for the filmmaker and her family to make peace with their father during his impending death. Like in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Jane By Charlotte, this is a work that’s actually more about the feelings of the filmmaker than the purported subject.

Eli, who created the Miami-based airline Air Florida, was forced to resign as CEO in the ’80s when he became confined to a wheelchair. Ondi uses these details, accompanied by archival footage and photographs, to construct a narrative that she intends to pay off in the present, as the family’s gathering and rallying around the patriarch becomes, in part, a means to assure him in his final moments that he did all that he could to provide for his family.

Last Flight Home’s two lines of interest—chronicling a man’s final days and narrating his life in its peaks and valleys—cannot be reconciled as conceived by Ondi because the contemporary footage of Eli, accruing bed sores and frequently communicating through pained expression, is evidence enough of his body’s failure in the face of death.

The contextual framing of Eli’s life also undermines the documentary’s sense of empathy by repeatedly insisting on the patriarch’s liberal bona fides. Not only did Eli know Joe Biden, we’re told by the family, but he has plans on how to make reparations both for slavery and “all the abuse and murder perpetrated on Native Americans.” Family members boast about Eli being an MSNBC junkie, and a fan of Rachel Maddow in particular. How or why this matters, except to exalt Eli as being an honorable man in his family’s eyes, nags at Last Flight Home. Which is to say that the context of his life as it relates to the fact of his certain death remains unresolved.