Tru­man

A fad­ing thespian’s self involved life comes into sharp focus when he is forced to address his death from can­cer. Julian (Ricar­do Darin), finds him­self torn between find­ing a suit­able new home for his dog, Tru­man, and con­fronting his own mor­tal­i­ty. To assist him in this endeav­our is Tomás (Javier Cámara), his old­est friend, who has trav­eled all the way to Madrid from his snowy home in Cana­da for a four-day extend­ed goodbye.

At every turn dur­ing Tomás’ vis­it, Julián attempts to find the defin­i­tive moment that will give his choice to refuse chemother­a­py some affir­ma­tion. But res­olute Tomás plays the smirk­ing fig­ure in the mir­ror, dis­tract­ing Julián from being com­plete­ly absorbed in dra­mat­ic grief. This occa­sion­al­ly leads to wel­come moments of humour, which land with sur­pris­ing effec­tive­ness; pos­si­bly because they weren’t look­ing for it. How­ev­er, a bud­dy com­e­dy this is not. More bud­dy tragedy.

Despite trips to the the­atre, Ams­ter­dam and revis­it­ing old ene­mies, the core of the sto­ry is fuelled by the com­plex rela­tion­ship between the two new­ly reunit­ed friends. Tomás slips per­fect­ly into a role that he has no doubt played before, one of the prag­mat­ic foil to Julián’s reflec­tive thes­pi­an. He takes care of the details, the mon­ey and the embar­rass­ment so that Julián can con­cen­trate of the truth of what is approaching.

But the inevitabil­i­ty of death, as direc­tor Cesc Gay con­veys through strate­gi­cal­ly placed moments of sen­ti­ment, is that those in our lives that we love (be they peo­ple or dogs) are the ones who are forced to deal with the after­math. At times the atten­tion to mor­tal­i­ty is dealt with in a black­ly com­ic fash­ion: ​“Isn’t the urn a bit small? Does it all fit in there?” At oth­ers, the issue is com­plete­ly ignored in favour of telling Truman’s sto­ry, which fluc­tu­ates between pan­der­ing to ani­mal lovers and appear­ing as a vehi­cle for dis­cussing posthu­mous decisions.

Like a young cou­ple prepar­ing their lives for chil­dren by start­ing with a dog, so has Julián used Tru­man to pre­pare for his death, and this is reflect­ed in Dárin’s sin­cere per­for­mance. Despite the human dra­ma, the final mes­sage rings clear: that it is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged, that the ani­mals in our lives can be our most inti­mate part­ners. They can be our best friends and we are cer­tain­ly not the only species to feel the afflic­tions of grief.