CAN I GET A WITNESS? (TIFF 2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale
Given the speed with which we are destroying our environment, our future is bleak indeed, and that’s certainly true if Can I Get A Witness? is any indication. For the film, Canadian writer/director Ann Marie Fleming reunites with Sandra Oh, who voiced a character in her 2016 animated feature Window Horses. Oh plays Ellie, a mother on the brink of her 50th birthday, who is reflecting on her life and relationship with her daughter Kiah (Keira Jang). Time is running short for her. She’s expected to take her own life on her birthday.
Taking influences from 1976’s Logan’s Run and, maybe, the post apocalyptic 1983 film Testament, the premise of Can I Get a Witness? is that to avoid complete environmental disaster, the world has come together to require that every person commit ritual suicide at the age of 50. Younger citizens with artistic talent are given the task of documenting their EOL, or End of Life. It’s either unfortunate, or a timely opportunity for valuable insight, that Kiah’s new job as a documenter coincides with her mother’s last days. Aiding her in her job is more experienced EOL facilitator Daniel (Joel Oulette), who has both highly developed pecs from burying the dead post EOL, and a troubling or potentially fatal heart problem.
The similarity to Testament is in the way Fleming has structured this post apocalyptic-styled tale as a character drama, despite the rather complicated political and spiritual underpinnings of the story. We are watching two young people, a potential couple, get to know each other, while simultaneously responding to being witnesses of highly ritualized deaths. We are also watching a mother and daughter mourning together, and sharing little intimacies as only mothers and daughters can.
What brings the film to a near standstill more than once is the heavy handed preaching about climate change, and the damage humans do to the environment, included in the dialogue. Also… there are just so many questions that are left unanswered:
Of all the ideas on how to save the planet, can’t Fleming come up with something that doesn’t add to the ageism already plaguing our world? Oof. And what about the documenters? What happens to all that art? The audience never gets a clue about that. How did the whole world get together to decide all 50 year olds dying was the way to go, when we can’t even get the countries currently part of NATO to agree on reducing emissions?
Fleming begins the film by declaring it to be a fable, which makes sense. The way various subjects Kiah and Daniel witness at their EOL behave, as well as how Kiah and Ellie mourn Ellie’s impending death feel like an extended metaphor in which Fleming is mourning the slow demise of Mother Earth. Oh (the film’s MVP) sells the hell out of that, while at the same time finding subtlety in a character resigned to the sacrifices necessarily to heal the planet. She, Jang, Oulette, and the many featured players are overwhelmingly the reason to see Can I Get a Witness?.
There is value in watching her and Jang as well as Jang and Oulette express the best of what it means to be human by showing what it means to lose those we love, or even witness strangers die. There is less value in the lack of believability and overt sermonizing.
3 out of 5 stars
