Ondi Timoner’s Sundance-debuting Last Flight Home is both a celebratory tribute to, and a shockingly intimate portrait of, a hardworking business and family man, whom adversity rendered a mensch. Indeed, the nonagenarian entrepreneur at the heart of this vérité doc — a Miami native who founded Air Florida, the fastest-growing airline in the world during the 1970s — was living an idyllic life until a neck cracking by a masseuse left the vibrant extrovert partially paralyzed at the age of 53. To compound the tragedy, this freak accident occurred before the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, thus allowing the upstart air carrier to legally force out the man responsible for building it.
Nonetheless, with Sunshine State optimism, grit, and drive — and the love and support of an adoring family, including a filmmaker daughter named Ondi — Eli Timoner managed to create a joyful, independent, and dignified life for himself. Which is why he ultimately decided to end that life, on his own terms.
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Unlike Timoner’s prior work documenting Type A males (for instance, 2015’s Brand: A Second Coming, 2018’s Mapplethorpe), Last Flight Home was not originally intended for outside eyes. The result is an oftentimes uncomfortably voyeuristic experience — home-movie personal and emotionally brutal. The director herself has described the doc as “borne of desperation,” primarily a means to capture the essence of her father’s life by filming the countdown to his final day on earth. And in this sense Last Flight Home serves more as a most unusual guidebook: a warts-and-all, 14-day account best viewed by the terminally ill and their loved ones, especially if they’re lucky enough to live in a state like California, which in 2016 passed the End of Life Option Act, requiring only a few hoops and a 15-day waiting period to obtain a death with dignity. At its core, Last Flight Home is a cinematic “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” for this particular kind of death.
Which leads to the thornier side of this noble enterprise — specifically that each individual death is as different as each birth; Eli’s ending cannot be considered in any way “typical.” This is not a quibble with the film itself, which is painstakingly (and painfully) true to the Timoner family’s narrative, but with the lack of any counter-narrative available to the broader public. Because there are so few true-to-life documentaries about the nuts and bolts of assisted death, audiences may end up taking the Timoner experience as the norm — right up until the fraught moment when viewers realize that holding a glass on his own and drinking the medicine in less than two minutes might be a requirement the incapacitated man can no longer fulfill. It’s not the filmmaker’s responsibility to present “all sides”; instead, the film points up the failure of film and other media to portray the wide spectrum of death. The doc risks being received as some sort of definitive manual for families going through, or considering, the euthanasia route.
Watching the film I wondered how to reconcile Eli’s bumpy landing with, say, my retired hospice director mom’s experience of the “easiest and most beautiful death” she’d ever witnessed? Eli might have waited too long to choose assisted dying. In contrast, my mother’s nonagenarian friend was able not only to easily bring a cup to his lips, but to savor and celebrate those last minutes with his family, relaxed and without fear, before passing away quickly and painlessly. In the end there are no easy answers of course, and yet one thing remains crystal clear: a dignified life deserves a dignified death. And that may take myriad forms.
Last Flight Home is available to stream on Paramount Plus and other streaming services.
Source: Hyperallergic.com