Last Flight Home

Ultimately, and perhaps most beautifully, the film makes a case, à la the musical “Rent,” about how, in the end, we must measure our life in love. On that score, Eli Timoner left the world a very wealthy man.

Like caring for someone at the end of their lives, Last Flight Home might not be the easiest film to experience, but it is an accurate representation of the ups, downs, and mixed emotions of those times, crafted with compassion, nuance, and great warmth.

This is an almost unbearably painful and emotional group family portrait.

Timoner uses a stripped-down, totally straightforward method. She sets up a camera in her parent’s living room, where her father is resting in a hospital bed and her mother is silently worrying on the couch. And then she begins counting down the days.

Guilt, shame, and regret are all frequent topics of discussion, as the family comes to terms with this impending event in wildly different ways. But however acutely intimate and emotionally formidable Last Flight Home can be (it is relentlessly both), it is thankfully tempered by the human being at the center of it.

It leaves the impression of a eulogy rather than a clear-eyed documentary.

Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.