BEFORE: Tim Robbins carries over from "Miss Firecracker", and before I forget, here are my actor/documentary subject links for the rest of July: Amy Adams, Billy Crystal, Chris Messina (yep, again), Will Ferrell, Zoe Chao, Hannah Marks, Kristen Stewart, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie (or Larry King or Regis Philbin, your choice), Elton John, Dolly Parton, Johnny Carson, Sting, Jann Wenner, Andrew Young (yep, again), and Oprah Winfrey (YES AGAIN). That chain may actually extend a little into August, I'm not sure yet how I'm going to space my movies out over the summer - but that should get us through the big Summer Music Concert and/or Documentary series.
THE PLOT: A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the first reality show to feature a real American family.
AFTER: Maybe there's a theme for the week, and maybe it's something about the American dream, and how hard it is to pursue it, but pursue it we must. Does it even exist? Stephen Glass couldn't find it - or did he end up personifying that pursuit? Carleen in "Miss Firecracker" sure couldn't obtain it, and neither could the Lisbon girls in "The Virgin Suicides" - sorry, this is all I really have to work with this past week, this very American week that happened to have the 4th of July in it. So, maybe I'm right on track?
I haven't watched a movie in three days, though, so clearly the Big Summer Slowdown has begun. I'm working two jobs, it's either hot as balls or there's a thunderstorm, so the weather sucks, and that (plus the two-job thing) means that even though the pandemic is essentially over, we can't really go anywhere. Sure, I had about 40% of last weekend off (Friday night plus Saturday) and we did drive out to the Chinese buffet on Long Island, but that's about all we did to celebrate the holiday. This weekend I'll just have Friday night free, then since "Black Widow" is opening in theaters, I'm working both Saturday and Sunday nights at the theater. Things are about to get crazy, so cutting back on WATCHING movies makes perfect sense, I'll be lucky if I can squeeze in five per week over the next few weeks - and four seems more likely.
Still, let's make hay while the sun shines - today's film is about the first reality TV show, pioneered by Craig Gilbert, who never received half of the credit (or, umm, the blame) that he should have. He came up with the idea of doing a 10-hour documentary series on PBS, called "An American Family", way back in 1973. The reasoning seemed to be that the U.S. had put a camera on the moon, but still had not managed to put one inside the average household. OK, but just because you HAVEN'T done something yet, that in itself does not make it a good idea. Did this average family even WANT to have TV cameras in their house? What effect would that have on a family, other than airing their personal problems and "dirty laundry" across the country? What, exactly, was the purpose that Mr. Gilbert was trying to serve?
More to the point, since Craig Gilbert did manage to achieve this, and enlighten the other families in America what the Loud family was up to, why did the HBO cable audience in 2011 need a dramatic re-creation of those same events? What purpose did THAT serve, other than to duplicate the thing that already existed? If anybody wants to know what happened on the TV show "An American Family", why not just WATCH that show? Binge all 10 hours, come on, that's what the kids are all doing now, right? So a cable movie does a dramatic remake of a documentary series - does this mean that someday we'll have to watch a fictionalized version of the first season of "The Real World", or actors re-enacting the first season of "Big Brother" or "Survivor" - seems kind of strange, right? Bad idea territory for sure.
What's weirder is the fact that this HBO movie (and yes, movies made for HBO count, according to my rules) worked in some of the footage from "An American Family", I guess to show us how close they were coming to the look of the original show and the Loud family members. That's an odd choice, like you wouldn't expect a World War II movie to mix footage of somebody playing General Eisenhower or Patton with footage of the real guys, you'd realize right away that John Slattery, for example, looked nothing like Eisenhower, not a bit. Brian Cox as Churchill, sure, but do a side-by-side with photos of Slattery and Ike and you'll realize some casting director was asleep at the switch. That same inconsistency is on display here, as Tim Robbins looks (almost) nothing like Bill Loud - how am I supposed to overlook that? If that's the case, then maybe DON'T include footage of the original guy he's supposed to be portraying. Diane Lane also does not resemble Pat Loud (who died in January 2021, age 94) but maybe with Gandolfini they came the closest, with extra hair and a beard he did look just a little bit like Craig Gilbert.
(While I'm discussing side-by-side comparisons, I have problems distinguishing actor Johnny Simmons from actor Ben Platt. Is that just me? Google them both and let me know if you see the resemblance... the only other time this happened for me was seeing Kyle Dunnigan on "Reno 911" as recurring character Craig Pullin, and I just assumed he was the same actor who played Kip in "Napoleon Dynamite", only he wasn't, that was Aaron Ruell. Again, Google search them both...)
I suppose the only reason to re-create the footage from "An American Family" is to maybe add a more modern spin on it - like with the oldest Loud child, Lance Loud. He's very dramatic, he wants to move to New York and be part of the scene, then he wants to go to Paris to do street theater, and he says "some man" will likely pay for his ticket - within five minutes, a modern viewer would realize that he's gay. But not back in 1973, his own parents seemed unaware of this fact, or they were in some form of denial about it. Mom figures it out first, but only after visiting him in NYC and attending a drag-queen theater show with him. Was Lance's father, Bill, ever brought up to speed? Did Bill even understand what it meant to be gay? (And why couldn't this film have been in my June line-up, for Pride Month?). This is a reminder how far the gay rights movement has come, because back in 1973 it was very difficult for a family to deal with this issue without attaching some kind of stigma to it.
On the other hand, there are Bill's multiple affairs, and in this re-creation it's not hard for Pat (and by extension, the audience) to see which way the wind is blowing on this one. Bill returns from a business trip all sunburned, and he claims he was walking around a construction site without a shirt on for three days. Right, because that's what foremen and contractors do on a hot day. When another woman in town appears just as sunburned as Bill, Pat makes the logical conclusion that her husband was really on a beach with that woman, which is much easier to believe. The director of the documentary series later learns that Bill has at least one other girlfriend on the side, and thus the filmmaker has to decide whether to break the trust of one spouse in order to maintain his bond with the other. And that's how easily the "rules" of non-interference are to break when making a documentary, it's kind of like quantum physics in that the act of observation is always going to have an effect on the events being observed.
Bill Loud is not really the last of a dying breed, but he does represent a certain patriarchal mentality, someone who believed that men get to go on "business trips" while their wives stay home and raise the kids, a woman could only get a job if that work didn't interfere with the housework and child care, and obviously a man could have a little action on the side, while a wife was expected to remain ever faithful. Double standards, across the board - but then again, we're all looking at this from a modern-day point of view, and I'm not saying things were better back then, but they were different and we have to acknowledge that when we judge these people, after the fact.
Eventually the show gets its most dramatic moment, the on-air request for the dissolution of the marriage, or rather the negotiation over how it's all going to go down. She'll take the girls to Taos for a week, while he moves his clothing and personal effects to a hotel. This part is never easy, it's one of the worst things that anyone ever has to go through, from either side. But change is part of life, and there's no way through it but to do it, and you hope to come out the other side relatively sane and together, that's the best you can do.
There's always more to the story, though, and one of Lance's last wishes was for his parents to get back together again - which they did, years later they moved back in together, which must have been some combination of comfortably familiar and incredibly awkward. What's that saying, that you can't unring a bell? This seems like it would be more like putting an egg back together after it dropped on the floor. But it happened, so maybe there's some hope in the world, however fragile and transient love and life can be. I don't know, it would be like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon getting back together again, I just don't see it happening (they're tied right now for appearances in Movie Year 13, with four each, this could get interesting). But didn't Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez recently rekindle their romance, in April? How long do we think that one's going to last?
Also starring Diane Lane (last seen in "Serenity" (2019)), James Gandolfini (last seen in "The Mexican"), Kathleen Quinlan (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Thomas Dekker, Patrick Fugit (last seen in "First Man"), Shanna Collins, William Belli (last seen in "A Star Is Born" (2018)), Lolita Davidovich (last seen in "Play It to the Bone"), Kyle Riabko, Kaitlyn Dever (last seen in "Booksmart"), Nick Eversman (last seen in "Wild"), Johnny Simmons (last seen in "Dreamland"), Caitlin Custer, Jake Richardson (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Matt O'Leary (last seen in "Brick"), Stephen Caffrey, Monika Jolly, Dendrie Taylor (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Richard Fancy (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Cory Blevins, Don McManus (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful"), Sean O'Bryan (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), James Urbaniak (last seen in "Where'd You go, Bernadette"), Patricia Scanlon, Danielle Sapia, Robert Curtis Brown (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), with archive footage of Dick Cavett (last seen in "Shine a Light"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Margaret Mead, Craig Gilbert and the Loud family.
RATING: 6 out of 10 rooms at the Chelsea Hotel
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