Prodigal Sons aroused a bit of a frenzy in Telluride leading up to its first screening on Friday––with a line around the block an hour before the screening, many pass holders were turned away––and no doubt in part due to the Orson Welles factor. As per the Festival program notes, in the film director Kimberly Reed, who “once was a male named Paul,” revisits her “tumultuous relationship” with her adopted brother Marc “and chronicles Marc’s discovery: he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.”
But Sons is hardly the exploration of starry ancestry that the logline might lead you to believe, at least not in much of a direct way. Though Reed does travel with Marc to Croatia, where he appears in another documentary and bonds with Welles’ ex-girlfriend Oja Kodar, ultimately she’s less concerned with Marc’s geneology than in his unlikely status as anti-social “other” in a family in which he’s the only sibling without an LGBT identification.
We’re told that Kim and Marc have been estranged for ten years before Kim decides to head back to their Montana home town to introduce her relatively new, female self at her 20 year high school reunion. (Assuming there’d be a story in her homecoming, Reed hired producer/cinematographer John Keitel to travel with her to Montana for the reunion, and the project just kept going.) Less than a year the former Paul’s senior, Marc insists he was “popular” in high school, but he couldn’t hold a candle to his then-brother, the co-captain of the football team and in general the classic specimen of the all-American teenage boy. Marc’s resentment has continued into near-middle age, even as his brother has become his sister and has sought to kill all vestiges of her male past. But her former, seemingly ideal masculine self won’t die so easily. As she puts it, she and her brother are “haunted by the same ghost.”
From certain angles, the all-grown-up Mark is the splitting image of his grandpa–if his grandpa was a modern day, middle-American lump in a too-tight wife beater, fanny pack and shorts, with a receding hairline no longer quite obscuring the scar of a massive head injury incurred via an accident incurred during celebration of his 21st birthday. There are intimations that Marc was difficult before his accident––that he constantly sought attention, that he felt frustrated and anxious over his inability to be like Paul––but by the time we check in, things seem to have become much worse.
Even on meds, Marc flips back and forth between irrational (and sometimes violent) rage, and self-pitying contrition. Eventually, after a number of scary incidents (most captured via quaking handheld camera, sometimes with the action just outside the frame because the person shooting is actually being threatened or assaulted), Kim gets involved in trying to get her brother medical help, but one wonders why an intervention took so long. Even if Kim wasn’t around to see her brother’s deterioration, didn’t his wife, mother or other brother ever feel the effects?
It would be fascinating if the answer to that question was the stuff of a 1930s horror movie––that something went horribly wrong when the great beauty Hayworth and the genius Welles mated, and 50 years later, their union somehow led to major dysfunction in an otherwise happy Montana family––a rising of old Hollywood’s repressed sins in the Heartland!
Unfortunately, in reality, Marc’s blood relations were/are only incidental to his problems as an adult, and Reed’s handling of his heritage in relation to his wider issues is not particularly purposeful or focused. Most frustrating, she allows Marc’s bloodline to pop up as a possible salve to his sickness, without examining how it might actually be responsible when miracles fail to take hold. Reed’s most successful when she’s allowing the Welles relation to just hang in the air as supporting evidence to her family’s structuring irony: as a high school jock and valedictorian turned extremely well-adjusted transgender lesbian, she’s moved through life with incredible ease compared to her adopted brother, whose Hollywood DNA couldn’t protect him from severe mental illness.
Prodigal Sons ultimately falls into the unfortunate trap of so many post-digital personal documentaries: it’s an Everybody Has One movie. Everyone has one tragic/triumphant story that, if shaped correctly, could make sufficient fodder for a film––but that doesn’t mean that everyone is a filmmaker. Best case scenario, Everybody Has Ones serve as calling cards for a filmmaker’s storytelling capabilities and aesthetic sensibilities. In this case, Reed’s autobiographical portrait has its fair share of meaty bits, but it suffers from both the director/producer/star’s lack of perspective on the material, and a general indifference to craft from both Reed and her cameraman/producer. It takes a certain type of personality to put one’s most painful moments on film; unfortunately this type of personality is not necessarily compatible with filmmaking acumen.
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