The new documentary "Must Read After My Death" is a by-now-familiar deconstruction of a "typical" American family, and it prompts the usual conflicted thoughts about the uses of editing: both the personal editing — of attitudes, inclinations and inner obsessions — that we all make in presenting ourselves to the world, and the later editing, by someone else, of these same data, contemporaneously recorded, in order to mount a biographical counterargument. Given sufficiently compelling material — as was the case with the explosive "Capturing the Friedmans," which examined a pair of father-and-son pedophiles — the results of such after-the-fact reassembly can be harshly illuminating. More ambiguous material, however, must be manipulated into significance, and the result, in the case of this film, is questionable.
Following the death in 2001 of his grandmother Allis (her surname isn't given), filmmaker Morgan Dews came upon a vast archive of family documentation — home movies, photographs, tape and Dictaphone recordings and voluminous transcriptions — that Allis had maintained throughout the 1960s. ("Must read after my death" is the instruction she appended.) The stuttery films and faded, scratchy photos show us a suburban American family straight out of the media clichй machine: the smiling young matron Allis herself; her workaday husband, Charley, with his owlish specs and sturdy grin; and their four beaming kids, Anne (the director's mother), Chuck, Doug and Bruce. In the snapshots and films, we see these people at happy play in the backyard of their large Connecticut home, and camping and canoeing on family getaways, and they're so picture-perfect, you know there has to be something dark going on behind the family facade.
And of course there is — why else would this material have been made into a movie? It all comes out in the audio recordings. Charley, who is apparently an insurance-company executive (it's never made entirely clear), spends much of the year traveling. In 1961, when the story begins, he's virtually a harbinger of the decade's coming sexual revolution, sending home tapes relating his adventures abroad with other women, and encouraging Allis to do some adventuring of her own. (She succumbs once, with minimal enthusiasm.) Charley is the type of man who uses his "liberated" behavior as a club to impose his narcissism on his wife. ("It was nice to be young again," he sighs after one fling.) Behind the white-bread smile lurks a type-A emotional bully.
At home, Charley is a domestic martinet, much focused on order and, for the kids, endless chores. He smokes too much, knocks back far too many martinis (the emblematic suburban elixir of the period) and drives everybody crazy. Anne leaves home to escape the endless parental bickering. Bruce compensates by overeating and "growing stout," as Allis puts it. Chuck struggles at school. Doug is miserable. Before long, Allis — who might have been one of the twittery, damaged neighbors in "Revolutionary Road" — comes under the sway of psychiatric shamans (she recorded her group-therapy sessions), and in 1966, she's persuaded to send Chuck, who's prone to fits of mounting rage, to a mental institution. "Somehow, somewhere," she confides to her tape recorder, "something went wrong."
Is this family screwed up? Clearly. ("I understand people who kill their children instead of have them be like this," Allis says at one point.) But is it all-time, stop-the-presses screwed up? Hardly. There's an eavesdropping creepiness to the audio montage that serves as the film's narrative, and Dews has skillfully layered it with the homemade imagery to produce a somber atmosphere of spiritual implosion. (The picture is very well-made.) But ultimately we learn that, although Chuck died after a car accident, Allis never actually killed the kids, and in fact they turned out fine. (Anne even went on to become a "spiritual counselor.") This isn't the sort of uplifting conclusion a director would want for a film like this, obviously, so at the end, when we're told of Charley's death from a heart attack, there's an egregious suggestion — made on the basis of no evidence — that some unspecified "violence" may have been the actual cause of his demise. This limp and distasteful attempt at a last-minute inflation of the story into a ringing verdict on the dark hypocrisy of its happy-smiley period exposes the shakiness of the picture's overambitious premise.
The last we learn of Allis is that after Charley's death, she moved to rural Vermont and lived there alone for the last three decades of her life. Presumably she put her tape recorder in storage. If there's a heaven, though, she may still be yapping away.
("Must Read After My Death" is now playing theatrically only in New York, but it can be rented digitally, in HD, at GiganticDigital.com.)
Don't miss Kurt Loder's review of "Gomorrah," also new in theaters this week.
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