Family Viewing

At the movies and on TV, the changing face of American domestic life

Comments (0) By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Feb 22 2006

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Dysfunction through the decades: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Godfather Courtesy Paramount Pictures

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Ultimately, though, movies are memorable not for the social issues they address, but for the timeless domestic passions they excite — the ungovernable yearnings, infidelities, jealousies and hatreds; the power plays that seethe in every family along with love and protection. Brokeback Mountain didn’t become the unlikeliest hit of 2005 because it’s a plea for greater tolerance for gays, but because it’s a story of forbidden attraction — and because it suggests that family is the enemy of romantic love, which could be why unsolicited faxes from Focus on the Family about the movie’s harmful effects on gays trying to go straight keep showing up in my in box. Meanwhile, it may be that the horror movie, with its malignantly physical penetration of private space, best expresses our current domestic terrors, though aside from David Cronenberg’s masterful A History of Violence, in which the brutalities of American culture become not only organic to family life but integral to its sexuality, we’ve had none worth mentioning. For all the extremity of American film culture these days, we live in singularly bloodless times when it comes to movies about the private sphere, which are dominated by clever, enervated comedies about families falling apart under the weight of their incoherence, their intensity, or just their incessant chatter. Consider The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Squid and the Whale and The Family Stone.

Coming from a family that kept such a tight lid on its emotions, I’ve always had a soft spot for that maligned and neglected form, the melodrama. Watching old movies on television when I was a teenager, I throbbed with schadenfreude as the rich clans in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane went down in flames of jealousy and bile. With my mother, I guzzled 1940s maternal melodramas on TV, glancing cagily sideways at her as Claude Rains’ psychiatrist counseled Bette Davis’ helpless Charlotte in Now, Voyager to “Stick to your guns without firing” when her demanding mater (a virago who made my own strong-minded mum look like Mrs. Miniver) threatened to overwhelm her. I thrilled to Charlotte’s liaison with married Paul Henreid and her stealthy nurturing of his child, and fantasized myself as both mother and daughter in some similarly boho domestic arrangement. In the 1970s, when American movies were dominated by paranoid political thrillers, I was wondrously creeped out by the insidious clans in The Godfather Parts I and II, with their taciturn patriarchs and sidelined matriarchs, their bursts of futile resentment and rebellion. Melodrama, a form too lush and intense for our low-key, therapeutic age and yet peculiarly suited to the emotive mess that is family life today, is long overdue for a splashy comeback, and I had high hopes for a rebirth when Todd Haynes’ wonderfully florid Douglas Sirk homage, Far From Heaven (2002), tore down the 1950s suburban family from its pedestal and recast it as a viper’s nest riddled with mendacity and self-deception. No one (unless you count Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans, a tale of one family’s sexual malignancy all the more powerful for being a documentary) followed up, though, and it may be a sign of our evasive times, and the poverty of genre cinema, that the nearest thing I’ve seen to a powerful melodrama that addresses the way the secrets and lies of family life bubble up, unbidden, at the worst possible moments, even in the most silent and laconic of families, is last year’s Junebug — a comedy.