A friend of mine once told me that it's all one big day. I wouldn't say I was skeptical, but I did take the time to interrogate the idea — and my friend — a little further. I had questions. What does that even mean? Is this one of those meaningless statements, like "it is what it is"? How is this philosophy supposed to change the way I live my life? I never got the answers I was looking for, but my friend remained confident in the idea, and I remained open to it. It has been sitting on the back burner of my mind ever since. Maybe there's something to this.
Don Hertzfeldt took the long way toward giving that idea somewhere to land. IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY started as three separate shorts made between 2006 and 2011 — EVERYTHING WILL BE OK, I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, and a third that shares its title with the eventual feature — each one existing on its own before Hertzfeldt stitched them into a single film. You can feel the seams if you look for them. Mostly you don't, because the method covers for it: stick figures, hand-drawn frame by frame, occasionally overtaken by bursts of color and abstraction that read less like stylistic flourishes than a mind losing its grip on the wheel. Bill spends his opening minutes failing at the smallest transactions civilization asks of him — mixing up "What's up" with "How's it going," replying "Weh" to a man he can't place, asking the checkout girl "how are you?" right back and getting nothing. None of it is dramatic. All of it is the specific, low-grade humiliation of being a person around other people, and Hertzfeldt trusts that register of embarrassment to carry the comedy for exactly as long as it takes him to need it to carry something else.
The nearest cousins here are SALAD FINGERS, which used similarly scratchy, homemade line work to smuggle real menace into something resembling a children's cartoon gone wrong, and ADVENTURE TIME, built almost entirely out of simple shapes that spent years tucking dementia and grief into its margins. The resemblance stops feeling merely visual. The Ice King's madness, engineered by the very crown that gives him his power, sits close enough to what eventually happens to Bill that one starts illuminating the other. Drawn simply enough, it turns out, almost anything can be made to say the unsayable before an audience notices what it's being told.
The office scenes run the same trick from the other direction: instead of shrinking Bill down to fit an ordinary embarrassment, they blow a coworker's small talk up to the size of a metaphysical crisis and act like nothing happened. A cubicle neighbor mentions twins separated at birth who each grew up to become serial killers, and the narration draws the conclusion before Bill has to: "it was as though they didn't have any choice in what they turned into." Then the coworker gets there in his own words — "Genetics is pretty messed up" — while his gum flies out of his mouth mid-sentence, and that's the whole eulogy for free will.
At lunch, the same guy is onto a physics book that's convinced him time doesn't pass so much as sit there: the past hasn't gone anywhere, the future's already happened, and the present is nothing more than wherever we happen to be standing in a landscape that was always there. Bill tries a joke — he could swear he's heard this somewhere before — and gets nothing back. Two of the largest claims a person can make about a life — that you may not have chosen who you'd become, and that past, present, and future may be less separate than they feel — arrive back to back on an ordinary workday. Put together, they leave an even more unsettling possibility hanging in the air: maybe there was never another version of Bill's life waiting to happen. Hertzfeldt doesn't score either revelation. He lets them sit there next to the gum and the sandwich, daring you to notice how much weight the scene is carrying.
Bill has been lying awake with his eyes open when the scene cuts to a bus stop, where a stranger with a leaf blower is working a few feet away. He doesn't stay a few feet away for long. Over the course of the scene he works his way steadily closer, the blower still running, until he's standing right next to Bill with no acknowledgment that anything about this is strange. It's the kind of bit SEINFELD used to build whole episodes around — an ordinary irritation escalated past the point anyone would tolerate it, played by everyone involved as though nothing is happening. Then, with no transition to soften it, the movie cuts to his grandmother deciding how she'd throw him into a fireplace.
Grandma's own mind is already going by the time we properly meet her. She keeps a preserved cat head in a drawer and wants more of them, from better cats, with cleaner ears and nicer hairdos. It plays as pure whimsy right up until the narration mentions her tumor, her seizures, her dementia — and you realize you've been watching decline the whole time without having the word for it. Then the film hands you her whole family tree in a few dozen lines, and it reads like a country song written by someone who's given up trying to make anything sound sad: her father cut in half by a train while eating an onion, her brother the preacher eventually killed by one too, her little sister dead of yellow fever and, almost in the same breath, on fire. A distant relative abandoned in the woods as a child grew up able to say only the word "Bible" and had a sunflower sprout from his head after he died. Her own mother spent her later years making jam and, with no change in tone, persecuting Jews.
None of it is played entirely as tragedy or entirely as a joke. It's delivered flatly, at the same volume as everything else — the same volume, in fact, as the cubicle guy's line about twins who never had a choice in what they turned into. Bill's illness isn't an anomaly the movie wants you to feel sorry for. It's the latest entry in a ledger that's been running for generations.
His mother's death arrives on an answering machine, delivered with the same affectless calm the movie extends to everything: she'd gone off her medication, the narration says she launched into a fit of senile hysterics, and she was hit by a train — which by now reads less like an isolated tragedy than a family trait. She'd reserved her own plot years in advance to lie beside her parents. A clerical error buries her fifty yards off instead, between a coffin full of rocks and a rich woman's golden retriever. Even the film's dead can't get their paperwork straight.
Bill goes through her storage boxes afterward and finds a hundred-year-old photo album stuffed with relatives he never knew, a few inexplicable photographs of bacon and lumber, and a series of portraits neatly labeled for a future reference nobody ever needed. Buried among them are photos of himself as a boy, and they unsettle him in a way the strangers don't. He'd read somewhere that every cell in the body eventually replaces itself, that a person is really a slow handoff of continuously changing parts. Looking at that kid's face, he can't shake the sense that his own "ridiculous ingrown cells" had long since stolen a dead boy's identity and made a mess of the life that came with it. The movie's question about what makes Bill Bill is already here, posed through flesh and childhood photographs well before memory begins tearing the same identity apart.
Underneath the album is a folder of his mother's own medical records — and clipped to her original diagnosis, a physician's note recommending, in plain language, that she never have a child. A few scenes ago, genetics was a stranger's theory about twins raised apart. Here, it turns out, it already had Bill's name on the paperwork.
Matthew, Bill's hospital roommate, is hidden behind a curtain in the next bed and communicates through a row of buttons that can each play a different electronic sentence. He almost never presses the other four. Whatever else the box lets him say, what he keeps choosing, over and over, is "I am in pain." It's a bleak joke and a real diagnosis at once: strip a person down to the barest possible report of himself, and what's left looks less like a personality than raw awareness registering damage.
Bill hasn't been stripped that far, but he's heading in the same direction. A new doctor asks him what month it is and he doesn't know. Asked for his address, he reasons that he must have always lived at the hospital, since he can't remember living anywhere else. He tells her he has a fish living in his head, possibly a trout, and means it. Every face in the room looks more or less the same to him now — he can still pick his ex-girlfriend out by her hair, but her name is gone.
After another round of tests, including a catheter threaded up into his brain to map the damage, the doctor sits down with his ex-girlfriend and delivers the line the movie has been building toward without saying it outright: once memory loss gets bad enough, the brain starts inventing what it's missing, filling gaps with confabulated stories and people who never existed — not lying exactly so much as repairing itself with whatever material is on hand. It's a clinical footnote in the moment. It's also the movie handing you the terms and conditions for everything that happens next, including the ending, well before you know you'll need them. By now it's clear that the film has been behaving like Bill's memory all along: fragments assembled into something that feels continuous because somebody is still there to experience them.
Later, once Bill is well into his last drive, he dreams of a cliff wrapped in fog, the sea working against the rocks somewhere far below. Lean over the edge in the dream and you can make out shapes under the water: cars that went over the side across the years, still down there, headlights flickering on and off beneath the waves, a little dimmer each time, until eventually they stop flickering at all. It isn't really an image about the cars. Ralph Waldo Emerson put something close to it more plainly, in a sentence Hertzfeldt never uses but might as well have: "Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not." The wave is Bill's family line, his workplace, his city, the species — whatever keeps moving regardless of who's currently making it up. The water is everyone who ever was, dimming underneath it, one headlight at a time.
There is a little Derek Parfit hiding in here too. One of the ideas running through REASONS AND PERSONS is that what connects one version of a person to another may matter more than some indivisible thing called identity. A useful way to picture it is as a rope rather than a single thread: thousands of overlapping strands of memory, intention, habit and character, none required to run untouched from one end of a life to the other. Bill's strands have been thinning since the office scene with the twins — his body replacing its own cells, the dead boy in the old photograph who somehow used to be him, names disappearing, memories filling themselves back in incorrectly. What the cliff dream adds is scale. Bill isn't uniquely coming apart. Everyone is temporary material inside something that keeps moving after us. The headlights dim; the wave doesn't.
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND makes the sharpest comparison, because it runs the same experiment with the one variable this film never lets Bill touch: choice. Joel decides to have Clementine erased from his memory after their breakup, the same procedure she's already had done to him, accepting the promise of forgetting as a clean fix for pain. Then, partway through the procedure, watching the memories go one by one, Joel changes his mind. He starts trying to hide Clementine in memories she doesn't belong to — a childhood humiliation, anything the machine might not think to check — fighting to keep exactly what he paid to lose. It doesn't work. He wakes up with no memory of her at all, meets her again as a stranger, and, after the audio tapes tell them exactly how badly it went the first time, chooses her anyway.
The film's answer to whether memory is something you possess or something you're made of becomes an answer to whether you'd erase the bad parts if you could: no, not once you understand what disappears with them. Bill never gets that scene. Nobody hands him a machine and asks if he wants this. His memory doesn't get erased so much as it stops holding its shape, and there's no version of him standing outside the process to decide whether to intervene. Joel's story is about a man who almost throws away what matters, loses it anyway, and is improbably given the chance to choose it again. Bill's is about what's left when nothing gets decided at all — and it turns out something is still there, assembling itself out of whatever material survives, whether anyone signed off on it or not.
Twice before his doctor tells him he doesn't have long to live, Bill takes almost exactly the same walk. "It's kind of a really nice day," the narration says, nearly word for word each time: out around the block, past the leaf-filled tennis shoe that hits him, both times, with the same inexplicable sadness, along the bridge, back up the main street. Then comes the diagnosis, and the walk happens again — in the same words, past the same shoe, with the same sadness still intact — except now it's surrounded by everything Bill never used to notice standing next to it. His bathmats become gorgeous. The grain in his kitchen cabinets starts vibrating with meaning. "He's alive, he's alive," the narration repeats, like a chant it's trying to convince itself of, building to "the stars rattled him to the core."
It's a moving passage, maybe the most moving one in the movie, and it's also where Hertzfeldt's argument and mine begin to separate. The film uses Bill's approaching death as the thing that finally shakes him awake, and I understand why. But the walk didn't change. The shoe didn't change. The sadness is still right there in the third version, unedited. What changed is everything Bill could finally see around it once he ran out of time to keep not noticing. Which means the day was already beautiful, twice over, before Bill had any reason to understand it that way. The film even names his old condition: Bill has been "sleepwalking," and something has finally shaken him awake. Fair enough, as far as Bill goes. It doesn't follow that death is what wakes anyone up. It only proves that someone was asleep.
For nearly an hour, the narrator has described Bill's life in exactly one register: flat, unhurried, willing to give a swallowed paperclip and a drowned half-brother the same tone of voice. Three dead horses in the road land as a punchline. That composure survives the last drive, the cliff dream, even a nursing home visit with a man who might be Bill's father and might not be — right up until Bill, the left side of his body gone slack and numb, stops the car, stands for a moment by a tree, and lies down in the grass. Then it breaks. "Wait a minute, he's not gonna die here?" the narration asks, and answers itself before anyone else gets the chance: "No, no, no, Bill, get up. Get up, Bill." It is the first time in the entire film that the voice describing Bill's life sounds like it has something at stake in how the description ends.
What follows is the biggest swing the movie takes. Bill doesn't die. He lives for hundreds of years, then thousands — learning every language, reading every book, fathering children whose own children he loses track of — while, the narration says, "death will forever be a stranger to him." Everyone he ever knew is swept from the earth around him. Names stop meaning anything. People stop meaning anything. He outlives his own species, befriends whatever comes after it — beings of light who worship him as a god — and outlives them too, for millions of years, until the sun is gone and the earth is gone and he no longer remembers his own name or where he once came from. "He lives and he lives," it says, "until all of the lights go out."
Whether any of that is literally happening is a question the film has already taught you not to trust your own answer to. A mind losing this much of itself, we've already been told, starts filling the gaps with confabulated stories and people who never existed — not lying exactly so much as repairing itself with whatever material is on hand. An epilogue this large, arriving in the same moment Bill lies down in the grass, is either the biggest fact the movie asks you to accept or the biggest confabulation it ever shows you being assembled. It isn't only a guess: Hertzfeldt has said the audience is meant to know only what Bill knows, "and he's very confused" — which leaves the ending as unreliable as the mind having it. The choice turns out not to matter much anyway: read the epilogue as real, and Bill spends millions of years traveling toward forgetting his own name. Read it as one failing mind's last invention, and he arrives at the same forgetting immediately, wearing the shape of a lifetime instead of a few seconds. Either way, the story continues after the stable version of Bill no longer can — the same problem the movie has been circling since his own memory first started filling in what it could no longer hold.
For scale like this, the nearest company is scattered and brief. An episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, "The Inner Light," compressed an entire lifetime into minutes so a dying planet would have one person left alive to remember it. THE GOOD PLACE spent its final season concluding that paradise needs a door out before anyone can choose to walk through it. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN gave an hour of television over to imagery operating on a scale no single character was ever built to hold. Bill gets no door, and nobody built this ending to let him choose one — the universe runs out from under him instead. Waves don't stop on their own. They stop when the ocean does, and the epilogue's last trick is taking the ocean away too.
A friend once told me it's all one big day, and I never did get an answer for what that meant. Hertzfeldt spends an hour supplying several I didn't ask for, none of which cancel each other out. Take the cubicle guy's physics book literally, and it's the most direct reading available: if the past hasn't gone anywhere and the future already happened, "day" was always the wrong unit to measure a life by. By the time Bill's epilogue arrives, "yesterday" and "in a few hundred years" are describing the same stretch of film.
Take it as a claim about memory instead, and it's what Bill's doctor already told you: a mind assembling fragments into something that feels unbroken because somebody is still there doing the assembling, whether those fragments span a single afternoon or several million years. Bill says something close to the same thing without knowing he's quoting anyone. "It's kind of a really nice day," he tells himself three separate times before the words finally mean what they say — and my friend's whole abstract claim turns out to have been sitting inside Bill's smallest, most literal sentence all along.
Or take it the way the cliff dream wants you to: the wave keeps moving, individual lives dim underneath it, and calling the whole thing one day or ten thousand years is partly a matter of where you happen to be standing when someone asks. It still sounds a little like a friend being confident about something vague. It no longer sounds like nothing.
Final Verdict: 86 out of 100