Review
TARNATION
Featuring Jonathan Caouette
Directed by Jonathan Caouette
Opens Friday, April 15
Uptown Screen
Every film critic’s nightmare is to have to sit through a debut feature assembled from the director’s home movies, starring himself, scored by snippets of every pop song in his record collection, and in which he tries to come to terms with his traumatic childhood by forcing his dysfunctional parents to explain why they failed to live up to Brady Bunch standards.
Jonathan Caouette commits all these sins and many more besides (most annoyingly, editing effects unworthy of the cheesiest mid-’80s music video), and yet Tarnation is one of the most engagingly moving debuts in recent American independent cinema.
The film’s success is attributable to three factors: Caouette has a remarkably likable screen persona for someone so intent on airing his family’s dirty laundry; he has a good sense of plot structure; and he has unexpectedly good taste in music.
Caouette was raised by his grandparents while modern psychiatry slowly destroyed his mother, beginning before his birth with (probably totally unjustified) electroshock therapy, continuing through 30 years of intermittent institutionalization and ending with a lithium overdose that left her severely brain damaged.
Growing up gay in Texas appears to have been the least of Caouette’s worries – in fact, it was probably his salvation, as he seems to have fallen in with a good set at an early age, sneaking into underground films in drag to hide his youth. The supportiveness of the gay community may be a cliché, but even though it is only a minor theme of this film, it certainly seems to have played a huge role in transforming him from a borderline psychotic youth into an intelligent, well-balanced (given the situation) and sympathetic young man.
Being given a video camera by his grandmother at age 11 also seems to have helped, and we are treated to what one must assume were cathartic early experiments in low-budget shlock-horror filmmaking, which slowly evolve into more temperate examinations of the real-life horrors of his life. Not particularly interesting in themselves, and frequently marred by the usual modern inability to rise above jargon (medical or New Age), once fitted into place with Caouette’s master storyteller’s sense of pacing and movement, they add up to a remarkably effective narrative.
Put together entirely on an Apple home computer using iMovie editing software, this has been heralded as a revolution in filmmaking. However, it has been known for decades that the perceived technical "limitations" of very low-budget filmmaking are no barriers to creativity, and, in fact, Tarnation is exceptionally unimaginative in its lo-fi technique (technically far superior films have been made with Fisher-Price’s toy Pixelvision cameras). What makes the film remarkable is the simple emotional power of the story and Caouette’s (rather strangely mixed) modesty, honesty and courage in telling it. |
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