October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.
The basics of the Mosher family story are largely outlined by Dottie, wife of PTSD-suffering veteran Don and mother of Donna. A survivor of a number of abusive relationships, Donna has two daughters: teenage Daneal, who is trying to protect her baby daughter Ruby from her own abusive ex-husband; and preteen Desi, whose father is in prison. Clearly, the women show a weakness, across generations, for shitty, shifty men — or, as Daneal puts it, “self-centered abusive motherfuckers with bad attitudes who think they’re better than everyone else.” As in Samantha Buck’s 21 Below, this seems to partially be a symptom of the community — there doesn’t seem to be a wealth of better options in Mohawk Valley for romantic and sexual partners — but the Mosher women are also very consciously trapped in rituals of learned behavior. Each woman speaks to the family curse. As Dottie laments, “Young girls today think it’s going to be different. They can’t comprehend the fact that you’ve been there, you’ve done that, and you don’t want that happening to them.” But all the while, she’s getting suckered by her charismatic criminal of a foster son. In this family, women take a leap of trust, and then they get hurt; rinse, repeat. The other female role model is Don’s sister, a Wiccan outcast who hangs out at the cemetery because, as she puts it, “Some of my best friends are ghosts.” This could be October Country’s tagline.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Halloween is a big deal in this house, and in fact, teh film spans a year from one edition of the holiday to the next. It’s through the first Halloween scene, when Desi spreads out her candy and her older sister (cradling her own infant) and grandmother partake that it becomes gut-twistingly apparent that the women in this family, even if forced to “grow up to fast”, age without fully maturing. As Daneal puts it later, as a mea culpa, “I’m still a kid, too. You can’t play mommie if you’re not grown up yet.”
A classical lower-middle-class lack of options is the setting and the defining limitation of the Mosher women’s lifestyle, but it’s not the only factor shaping the hopelessness of the lives. October Country speaks to the power of family as a determining characteristic, as a co-dependent force from which it takes a motivating desperation to escape. As a movie about the struggle to break the cycle, it makes sense that it could only be told with the perspective of a member of the family who did manage to leave the fold and live a life unscripted by circumstance and local ritual. Donal Mosher never appears on screen in October Country, to the apparent frustration of some viewers. I think the filmmakers make their presence felt, through their visual choices, the intimacy of the footage, and in what appears to be an isolated case of intervention.
Early in the film, Desi, often left to amuse herself with TV and video games in the absence of her single mom, watches footage just recorded by the filmmakers at a family gathering. Desi responds to footage as though it’s an ordinary home movie, which in a way it is, but this scene is also a kind of microcosm of October Country’s thesis query. A portrait of a family of women very consciously stuck in a cycle of self-limiting (if not self-destructive) behavior, the film and the family within it have their fingers crossed that Desi will be the first female Mosher to learn from the family’s mistakes. Maybe it could be as simple as literally watching it.
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October Country won the US Feature grand prize at SilverDocs this week; it screens in competition at LAFF tonight.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth