If you’re planning on seeing The Last Flight Home at the cinema, don’t make any plans for afterwards as you’ll be completely done in. I soaked the top half of my jumper with the crying, and then needed to race home to wring it out. It’s an unflinching documentary from film-maker Ondi Timoner following her father in the last days of his life right up to the moment he dies. Old age is no place for sissies, Bette Davis once famously remarked, and neither is this film. But it is also about how to live, how to be a mensch, and so full of love and respect. Plus, the older you get, the less of a sissy you can be. (Or so I find.)
Ondi Timoner (Dig!, We Live in Public, Mapplethorpe) had only intended to film her father, Eli, so that she might have some footage for his memorial, but then kept on filming with his full consent. It never feels exploitative. At the outset, Eli, 92, is in hospital with breathing difficulties and heart disease. He had suffered a stroke at 53, and had been paralysed down one side of his body and could only walk with a cane. Now he is bedridden. He’s in constant pain, exhausted, has had enough, and does not wish to be a ‘burden’ on his devoted wife, and Ondi’s mother, Lisa. He begs Ondi to help him exercise his rights under California’s End of Life Option Act, which allows mentally competent, terminally ill adults to self-administer a fatal dose of drugs. Once they are on this path, it’s 15 days before the drugs can be administered. Now the countdown begins.
The moment of Eli’s death is both incredibly unremarkable and incredibly upsetting
He is brought back home to his and Lisa’s modest house in Pasadena where the rest of his devoted family gather.
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