Tammy’s Always Dying Parent Guide

Catherine MacDonald (Anastasia Phillips) is transfixed as a guest on a daytime talk show says, “First, you have to identify what is toxic in your relationship. Second, you have to find the courage to leave.” For Cathy, identifying her dysfunctional relationship with her mother is easy. It’s leaving that’s difficult.

In the parent lottery, Cathy lost. Her mother, Tammy (Felicity Huffman), is on a downward spiral of alcoholism and depression. When her welfare money runs out each month, she climbs a nearby bridge and threatens to jump. Every month, Cathy talks her down and buys her breakfast at the local diner. Despite Cathy’s constant forbearance, Tammy neither respects nor appreciates her. She berates her for a teen abortion, mocks her childhood ballet dancing and failed flute playing, and tells her that she is a “nothing person” who has no value except to look after her.

The tragedy of Cathy’s life is that she believes her mother. She desperately wants her life to mean something, but she puts up with her mother and allows herself to be used for transactional sex by a married ex-boyfriend. When Cathy finally finds the backbone to back away from her mother, Tammy encounters a genuine crisis, significant enough to pull Cathy back into her orbit.

Tammy’s Always Dying is an unrelentingly depressing movie. Tammy may well be a troubled soul scarred by who-knows-what mental illness or childhood trauma. But she is also a vicious mother – heartless, cruel, and selfish. Watching her repeatedly attack her gentle daughter is stomach-churning. It’s also dispiriting to see how trapped Cathy is, not just by her vicious mother, but by the poverty and lack of opportunity that keeps her tied to the crumbling part of Hamilton where she lives, outside of the glittering big city of Toronto where she longs to go.

If the story isn’t depressing enough, the content is seriously problematic. Ninety sexual expletives in an 85 minute movie means that profanity is non-stop. And although the sexual content doesn’t involve nudity, it’s still obvious (and adulterous). Furthermore, all of the major characters consume alcohol – Tammy to excess - and everyone smokes throughout the film. The biggest problem, though, is the script’s attitude towards suicide. It’s treated as comic fodder or as a noble self-sacrifice and is never properly addressed as a mental health crisis that needs treatment. Not even superb performances by both Anastasia Phillips and Felicity Huffman are enough to overshadow these seriously dangerous and misleading messages. Tammy might be dying, but don’t let this movie kill off 85 minutes of your life that could be spent in far less bleak pursuits.