I soaked my jumper with tears: The Last Flight Home reviewed

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.

He is brought back home to his and Lisa’s modest house in Pasadena where the rest of his devoted family gather. There’s Ondi’s two siblings (David, a film and TV editor, and Rachel, a rabbi) and various grandchildren. Even though Eli can barely open his eyes, he is totally charming, totally sharp, and totally devoted in return. ‘Are you scared?’ he’s asked. No, he says. ‘I truly believe I’ll be up above looking over my wife and my children, and protecting them.’ He gives advice to one of his (weeping) grandchildren: ‘Respect the people you don’t know and love the ones you do.’

Eli was obviously a terrifically caring, generous man. Zoom calls are lined up, so he can say goodbye to various people, including the au pair who came to work for the family when she was 18. She says: ‘You were the first man I ever saw who was a wonderful father and so kind to everybody.’ Career-wise, he had been a big deal. An entrepreneur, he’d founded Air Florida which, at one point, was the fastest growing airline in the world. He had his stroke in 1982 due, can you believe, to a neck injury incurred during a massage after a game of tennis. He was asked to resign from Air Florida’s board as his disability wasn’t a good look for the company. Money troubles followed and he had to borrow from friends ‘like a gutter rat’. He adds: ‘It was so painful and I felt so much shame.’ The family want him to shed this guilt. ‘What you have provided for us,’ says Rachel, ‘is love and care and we want you to know how good you are and that you are a shining light.’

The 15th day arrives. It’s a three-step process: an anti-emetic drug, another to slow the heart, then the barbiturate overdose. You see the moment of his death, which is both incredibly unremarkable and incredibly upsetting. It finishes with Rachel’s words at Eli’s memorial: ‘The true worth of a life is measured in love and in this he wildly succeeded.’

Then you’ll have to dash home to wring out your jumper.