Death of a Ladies' Man - Dying to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen

“Who am I and who are the ghosts?”

Philosophers often note that our mortality brings insight into our understanding of life. For example, Samuel Johnson noted: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Such is the premise of Matthew Bissonnette’s Death of a Ladies’ Man. The film is a darkly comedic “concentration of the mind” with a framework of Leonard Cohen music.

Gabriel Byrne (Samuel) in Death of a Ladies’ Man

Samuel O’Shea (Gabriel Byrne) is an alcoholic English professor who begins to have very strange experiences. He runs into Frankenstein’s monster in a bar and the two stumble down the street together singing “Good Night, Irene”; at a hockey game everyone stands for the national anthem and the singer breaks into “Like a Bird on a Wire” while the players figure skate around the rink (possible the best movie scene of the year); he comes home to find his dead father smoking at his kitchen table.

After a few such episodes, he goes to the doctor and learns he has a brain tumor that will kill him in a manner of months. Without telling anyone what is going on, he heads off to his childhood home in Ireland to write the novel he always wanted to write. There he connects with a younger woman who becomes his lover. He also has many conversations with his father (Brian Gleeson) about death.

In the film, we experience his hallucinations as if they are real—and, at times, we may not know what is real or imagined. The film is designed to be somewhat paradoxical: a comedy about death, reality blended with imagination, celebrating love in the midst of loss, finding life in the knowledge of death. The film even creates the paradox that Samuel’s father is younger than he, since he died young.

Brian Gleeson (Ben) and Gabriel Byrne (Samuel) in Death of a Ladies’ Man

The film is also about parents and children. The conversations the Samuel has with his father are in someways the passing on of wisdom that Samuel needs at this point in his life. The key teaching from his father is, “…Another woman, another person, another anything, isn’t the answer to every last thing that wrong with you.” Samuel, in turn, must come to grips with his relationship to his children and their issues in life.

As the film is structured into three chapters (each with a title that is a line from a Cohen song) that describes a step along the way to Samuel’s understanding of the meaning of his life. There are also various musical numbers in which the imagined people in Samuel’s mind break into a Cohen song—each which fits beautifully with the tone of the film and the process of Samuel’s emotional development.

The final chapter rushes to Samuel’s enlightenment perhaps a little too quickly. A fair amount of time has passed with some very important events that we only briefly. The clarity with which the film portrays addiction doesn’t manage to show the difficulty of discovering life within sobriety, which is a step in Samuel’s growth that we only see the result of. That said, Death of a Ladies’ Man does a good job of reminding us that death is a certainty for us all, and that knowledge can be a source of insight into the lives we seek to live.