Steady Diet of Film

Review: Prodigal Sons

In 2005 Kimberly Reed documented her first trip back to her hometown of Helena, Montana after moving away 20 years prior. The impetus is a high school reunion, but Reed's nervousness about returning to her small town roots goes beyond the typical teenage angst laid on top of mid-life anxieties. During the long separation, in the years since Reed graduated high school, she transitioned from male to female and has actively avoided seeing anyone from her "Paul" years. 

But her former classmates provide nary an ounce of coastal schadenfreude. While word has certainly gotten around that the former star high school quarterback is now a lipstick lesbian living in Manhattan, most of her former classmates find the transgender issue a fairly dull one. One woman laments, "None of us are who we thought we'd be when we were 18." Another cracks a joke about 'lady drivers' when discussing Paul's driving habits back in the day.  

Reed has a far more difficult time with her older, adopted brother Mark. Similar to Donal Mosher's and Michael Palmieri's recent October Country, we see an adopted son who, despite feeling his family's love, is unable to ever feel he's a part of the group. After receiving a traumatic brain injury in a car accident at age 21, Mark experiences bouts of memory lapses, extremely poor impulse control and uncontrollable rage. Unable to have a normal adult life, he retreats emotionally into his childhood. But it's evident Mark wasn't much happier then either.

The film shifts focus to Mark and the difficulties his family faces dealing with his rapidly deteriorating condition. There is a fleeting moment of hope when Mark is discovered by his birth mother and learns that his biological grandparents are Hollywood film legends Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. He is immediately flown to Croatia by Welles's long-time lover and has attention lavished upon him for his previously unknown genetic legacy. He's even invited to participate in a forthcoming documentary about Welles's long-lost works (badumching!) However, it quickly becomes apparent that this new information about his past (along with a combination of medications and therapy) won't be enough to overcome a lifetime of dysfunctional family dynamics and physical damage. Soon after the trip to (unbelievably gorgeous) Croatia, separate scenes capture Mark beating Kim, strangling his younger brother and threatening his mother with a knife on Christmas Eve.

Reed weaves these two narrative threads together, one sibling who is confident in his body but experiencing constant emotional and mental chaos. With herself, at odds with biology but with the confidence (and medical procedures) to become more actualized. Since Reed identifies so much with the commonality in these stories, she is that much more invested in creating environments for Mark to thrive, often at the expense of herself and those around them. In doing so, the film explores the challenges of familial responsibility in situations that modern medicine is ill-equipped to manage. 

For two years, Prodigal Sons played more than a dozen documentary and regional festivals. Reed's story recently caught the attention of daytime television giant (turned documentary film dream-maker), Oprah Winfrey, who dedicated an entire episode to championing Reed's experiences of being transgender. The film is now having a national theatrical run and will screen in Portland at Living Room Theaters April 23rd.

Review: Hunger

British artist Steve McQueen's directorial debut Hunger focuses on one of the darkest periods in Britain's recent history. When Irish republic activists were arrested en masse and staged a brutal protest campaign to make their imprisonment as costly, exhausting and embarrassing for the British government as humanly possible. The prisoners banged on walls, screamed all day, refused to bathe or use toilets and eventually went on hunger strikes that created a martyr out of a then 27 year old Bobby Sands (played by Inglourious Basterds' Michael Fassbender).

McQueen's background as a performance and video artist is expertly translated to screen -- cocooning a series of small, contrasting political screeds within images and juxtapositions that cannot be easily erased from the viewer's mind. Hunger contains many of the trappings of the historical biopic: the young police officer who considers himself apolitical, locking himself in bathroom stall and sobbing; a young protester recounting a story of getting into trouble as a kid that provided the foundation of his political ideology; Margaret Thatcher's defiant pronouncements filling the air anytime someone turns on a radio; an older, Protestant dead-ender now a prison doctor, whose cruel acts provide contrast to the young staffers all growing weary with concern and personal doubts as the hunger strikes begin to claim lives; and, much to my personal delight, the use of Buddhist imagery to underscore death.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.com

Review: October Country

My freshman year in college I took a super-8 workshop where over the course of 10 weeks we learned how to light, shoot, edit and project these tiny little strips of film. Our instructor (a woman who would 11 years later become my producing partner) told us that children would be extremely difficult to work with because they've been raised in a digital world and would be frustrated that footage they participated in wouldn't be available to look at for weeks. Even a decade later I can clearly remember in that moment thinking, "those kids have a point". I learned the bare minimum of how filmstock functions at the point in the digital transition when people who cared about art were happy holdouts, working exclusively with film no matter the expense or time-suck (or frustration of children). At that time digital was associated exclusively with activist-oriented documentaries, bent on conveying a point of view for low costs and with even lower expectations.

Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri's documentary October Country demonstrates that new technologies have emerged to allow the best of these ideologies to merge. Shot entirely on digital, October Country shows a year in the life of four generations of Donal's family. The Moshers reside in upstate New York and each of them readily admit are trapped in a terrible cycle of poverty, domestic violence, child molestation and PTSD. Despite the constant misfortune it depicts, it's one of the most beautifully shot films this side of a Wong Kar-Wai story. October also demonstrates the awareness even casual users have developed with being recorded and how infinitely copyable these images have become. In one scene, wise-cracking tween Desiree watches footage of herself trick-or-treating while snacking on that evening's goodies and insists, "You're going to get me a DVD of this, right?"

Grandparents Dottie and Don preside over the damaged brood. Dottie spends so much her time in damage control mode she admits she doesn't even know what 'normal' is anymore. Don quietly agrees with his wife's assessment of him -- that after serving in the military and working as a police officer for 27 years he's become a hardened and difficult person to live with. While working on household projects to add incremental value to their property, he sagely observes his failures to prevent the young women in his life from reaching out to emotionally distant abusers to re-create a malformed sense of security. Don's sister Denise, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis in her 30s, lives nearby but has little relationship with her brother. Dottie and Don's daughter Donna has two daughters, Daneal (who became a mom at age 16) and Desiree (whose father is in prison for molesting Daneal). Teenage Chris, a foster child taken in by the Mosher grandparents, was cast out of his own family at age 5 after being accused of molesting his sister.

Because the Moshers are telling their story to their own son/brother/uncle the film avoids a three act structure or excessive exposition. We understand almost immediately how low the trajectory is for these people's lives and instead of expecting any last minute heroics, we're allowed to settle in with their feelings about their situation. And as these stories develop organically a host of secondary issues flourish without feeling like one is being beaten over the head by a Micheal Moore-style agenda. We see how drastically a small town is affected when cost-cutting measures are taken at the factory that employs much of the town, the resentments that bubbles up within a family who blame each other for their lot in life and how disproportionately poor women are victims of sexual violence.

What will keep October Country in the good graces of the lovers of complicated films who just a few years ago believed the only way to convey emotion was on expensive, time-sucking celluloid is the film's implicit belief that society lacks the will, interest or ability to address their particular crisis. Denise lives in subsidized housing, Daneal collects food stamps, Desiree's father is in prison for child molestation and Chris is in and out of juvenile detention for petty crimes. But none of the Moshers believe these are meaningful interventions or will ever be effective corrective measures. Instead they are seen as stop-gap measures to further bide their time. Most documentaries that depict crisis are able to end with a title card telling the audience to give money to an organization or write their congressman. That's not an option for October Country, nor do we ever see a talking head of a social worker, politician or academic to explain what can be done about the issues of violence, addiction and poverty. The Moshers' story highlights both the worst elements of humanity, the messy long-lasting aftermath and the inability to address the root cause of these issues.

Update: October Country will be screening in Portland at Fox Tower Fri April 2 - Thurs April 8, 2010.
Directors in attendance on Friday and Saturday 7:05pm screenings.