If this job has taught me one thing, it’s that filmmakers can make funny movies out of even really grim subjects. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have given us good serious movies about PTSD like American Sniper and The Messenger. This week’s My Dead Friend Zoe is half of a funny movie about the subject. That makes it unique and something to recommend, despite its shortcomings.
The film gives its premise away both in its title and in the first five minutes. Afghanistan veteran Merit Charles (Sonequa Martin-Green) is attending court-mandated group therapy in Oregon with fellow vet Zoe Ramirez (Natalie Morales) when Zoe stands up in the middle of someone else’s share and starts trashing the whole exercise: “Aren’t we better than this ‘woe is me’ shit? Did we not join the most powerful military of all time? Did we survive the dumbest wars of all time, just to sit here all broken and say ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘I have to eat my feelings.’? Get it together! God!” Nobody reacts to this because only Merit can hear it. Zoe is dead, and her ghost appears to her mostly to make snarky remarks about Merit’s housekeeping habits and the fact that she has recently lost her job.
Merit has precious little time for it, because her recently widowed grandfather (Ed Harris) — a retired Army lieutenant colonel and the man who inspired her to enlist — has been found wandering beside the highway and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. While her mother (Gloria Reuben) is already making arrangements to put him in a retirement home and sell his lake house, Merit dodges her therapy sessions by hiding behind her grandfather’s situation and flirting with a guy who works at the nursing home (Utkarsh Ambudkar).
Director/co-writer Kyle Hausmann-Stokes is an Army veteran who served in Iraq and received a Bronze Star, and he based this story on two of his fellow vets. I do like how he captures the ins and outs of post-service civilian life without leaning too hard on the first-hand research that he has clearly done. (Real-life servicemembers portray the other patients in the therapy group, with the exception of the therapist, who is played by Morgan Freeman.) The premise is a delightful one that’s made more so by the comic energy brought by Ambudkar and also Morales, who plays the role like someone whose death has lifted away all her cares. They both play well off Martin-Green, though she’s somewhat handicapped for reasons that I can’t get into. The flashbacks with our two main characters whiling away the boredom in Afghanistan inform the sequences in the present day as well, as they talk about Rihanna, male soldiers who harass them, and their plans for the future.
I can’t ignore the way this movie disintegrates in its second half, as the movie loses track of Zoe and her less-frequent appearances become proportionally less funny. The way Merit’s grandfather finds out about her plans for the home is particularly clumsy as well. The big revelation about Zoe’s death doesn’t make as big an impact as the movie seems to think, too. Hausmann-Stokes wants to give a serious subject its due while also being funny, which is a hard balance to manage, and he loses control of it in the back half.
I think we can write these off as the growing pains of a first-time filmmaker. There’s more than enough in his comic writing and the performances he gets out of his actors to encourage me about Hausmann-Stokes’ future prospects. He’ll make better movies than this if he keeps at it, I think. In the meantime, My Dead Friend Zoe is just odd enough to be worth its 100 or so minutes.
My Dead Friend Zoe
Starring Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales. Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes. Written by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes and A.J. Bermudez. Rated R.
