This is an odd film, constructed entirely of audio recordings and home movies. I walked in a few minutes late and missed the beginning, and then ended up leaving early. So take this for what it’s worth.
On the face of it, Must Read After My Death is 100% up my alley: family dysfunction, psychoanalysis, home movies – a trifecta of my top interests. The story, as far as I could make out (and later read): an upper-middle-class American family made hundreds of hours of recordings of its members’ inner lives, first as audio letters between Dad working in Australia and Mom and the kids back home in Connecticut, then as audio diaries made at the prompting of psychotherapists. The family, in a nutshell, is fucked up (in the Philip Larkin sense – I’m not using profanity gratuitously here): Mom and Dad have an open marriage, Dad tells mom in great detail about his “adventures,” Mom has the occasional fling of her own, Dad is obsessed with the kids keeping their rooms neat, and everyone slowly goes mad.
The film consists of these audio recordings, cut with the family’s home movies and photos, and home-movie stock footage – i.e. other people’s home movies. So there’s certainly lots here to make a disturbing and illuminating film. And yet… after 20 minutes of this, I felt like I’d seen enough. Maybe it was because I’d missed the set-up… but 20 minutes should be enough to catch up. Mostly, I think, it was because the film had a sameness to it. It didn’t feel like it was going anywhere, and it didn’t have any kind of reflective quality. With no context, nothing but these deeply disturbed voices from 40 years ago, the film, curiously, didn’t draw me in. The droning minimalist soundtrack didn’t help. It may be that the composer’s intent was to create discomfort; if so, he succeeded, but not to the benefit of the film. The experience of viewing Must Read After My Death felt voyeuristic without being illuminating. I was craving context, more information, a voice beyond the tapes. When I realized that this voice wasn’t coming, I was done.
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Film Review: Must Read After My Death
By Stephen Farber
Jun 23, 2008
Los Angeles Film Festival (Gigantic Releasing)
Fans of the fascinating documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" might want to take a gander at "Must Read After My Death," which is in competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Like that earlier film, this one incorporates a wealth of home movies and audio tapes to document the behavior of a dysfunctional family over a period of years. The secrets revealed here are not quite as shocking as the hints of child molestation captured in "Friedmans." Still, this is an equally intriguing and unsettling look at the turmoil hidden behind the white picket fences of suburbia.
Charley and Allis were married after World War II and raised four children in Hartford, Conn. (Their last name is not given because of privacy concerns by their surviving children.) They seemed to have a compulsive desire to document their lives because they left thousands of feet of home movies as well as numerous tape recordings that chronicle their problems. Some of the recordings were made at the behest of their psychiatrist, who counseled them and reinforced the prejudices of the era regarding a woman's place in the home.
Although Allis was a strong-willed woman, she was encouraged to subordinate her own needs to those of her husband, a drinker and philanderer. Their children suffered as a result of this psychodrama. Two of them were sent to mental institutions, and one of them died as a teenager. Eventually, Charley also died under mysterious circumstances, after Allis confronted him about his failings.
Technically, the film is limited by the quality of the home movie footage, but it remains engrossing, if not quite as explosive as "Friedmans." The director, Morgan Dews, happens to be the couple's grandson, and he was granted access to the tapes after Allis' death.
Given the resistance to documentaries at the boxoffice, the film will find only a limited audience. But that audience will be riveted.
Director-writer-producer-editor: Morgan Dews. Executive producer: Alison Palmer Bourke.
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