Tarnation

I know I should, but I don't watch many documentaries. It's a different world inside of film-making, one in which everything is, among other things, real. Another feeling that a documentary generates is immediacy; a sensation of present time even if it's telling something that's older than you. "Tarnation", a life story, is a striking view of a unique personality.

Jonathan Caouette, its director, is now in his thirties; but it's like he had planned it all his life, like if he had known it would be a completed project all along. Here we see a lot of films inside of the big film, that Caouette put together to show who he is, what he does, how he feels and how the people who live around him act.

More than the rest, there is a focus on his mother, Renee LeBlanc, who suffers from schizophrenia and didn't live with him for a long time. She lives with him now and Jonathan lived with his grandparents for a lot of years, and he didn't know his father but he tried to find him; and he also lived with foster parents and he always knew he was gay.

This and more is seen in the images he put together in a program anyone with a Macintosh –Apple- computer can use. I don't want to say much more because "Tarnation", although not great, is really magical and inspiring…Magical because is like nothing you've ever seen before; inspiring because it shows and speaks of the creativity of the filmmaker. It will give to anyone who's thinking about doing cinema ideas about tons of things, unstoppably.

And "Tarnation" is also a film for any true cinema lover, because it contains references to a lot of names and important influential cinematographic figures. But influential for him, who, as he inspires us, shows us who inspired him…One example that comes to mind is the fact that Caouette and a friend made a musical stage version of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" when they were in high school.

He says it in the film's tag-line: "Your greatest creation is the life you lead", and he is right. So be encouraged, and if you feel that you should make a film out of every day you live, don't worry and write about it; or carry a camera with you through the day. This is the kind of message "Tarnation" wants to leave, cinematically.

Emotionally, it wants to show the truly difficult experiences of a genius who, somehow, had a whole movie in his head and wanted the world to know he's not afraid of showing these experiences with and in it…Life is like that, you can't escape it; write that down.

Why do I feel as though I've watched a young man masturbate in front of me for two hours while in a conference room filled with clergy or nuns? Andy Warhol free form new wave movies come to mind? Woody Allen on speed? This poor boy should be in individual and group therapy for the rest of his life.

I'm glad he made 'art' out of trailer trash surrounds but I guess I'm not feeling any pathos or empathy--just an urge to turn down the volume and/or walk away. It is the same sensation one gets while watching an accident or encountering a street person who didn't take his meds today--but for the grace of God,etc. Such experiences convince me of a godless universe and at the most a hope that some Buddhists are on the beam. My parents were both substance abusers (cocktail swigglers/50s style)and I left this film feeling my life had been slightly left of the Donna Reed Show. I know now why I fled NYC at the age of 32--too many actor friends and wanna bees who were cycling together in their own imaginary worlds. I remember feeling the need for a real dose of average behavior at the time. (Now that Bush got in again, I'm not sure that is a good thing either) Well, good for this young man and his ego that he got noticed. He makes Edith Bouvier Beale look bland ("This is the only costume for the day, I think." "What I need is a manager, but he's got to be a Libran!") except she was much more interesting thanks to the Maysles. Aaah, well, I'm getting old, I guess. I do wish I had that seven dollars and fifty cents for the matinée show refunded, though.

Tarnation NR(language, disturbing violent and sexual images) ****/out of 4

Tarnation could possibly be the best film of the year. It is unique, original, disturbing, one of a kind, sad, heartbreaking, powerful, inspiring, and completely mesmerizing.

The film is not for the squeamish because of intense the subject matter, as well as the bizarre images. It is truly remarkable that Jonathan Caouette took his whole life in home video format and narrowed it down to 90 minutes. The editing techniques force the viewer to get sucked into the mind and life of a schizophrenic person.

Being taken through the early days of Caouette is very hard to watch. With a mentally ill mother going through shock treatments, he went from many foster homes to living with his grandparents(mentally ill grandma). Caouette became involved with drugs, cross-dressing, homosexuality, suicide, and film-making...and all this time he had a video camera by his side.

For its $218 budget, its editing being done on iMovie, and its tragic humane story, it's truly a shame that "Tarnation" is another indie film that is really destined to be remember forever and ever.

Super-8 auteur Jonathan Caouette, a young gay man with an extremely turbulent life, reveals his troubled childhood through home-movies and stills. The worshipful son of a beautiful ex-child model/single mother/electro-shock recipient, Caouette manages, in surprisingly linear fashion considering the circumstances, to paint a vivid portrait of the ultimate dysfunctional family. His grandparents, who ended up adopting Jonathan after his mother was jailed and he went through the horrors of the foster care system, are revealed as loving yet unconcerned older folks with perhaps a secretive, defensive side; Jonathan's mother Renee, once a striking young woman, is the sad result of "medical expertise" gone shatteringly wrong. The film is alternately assaultive, theatrical (Jonathan revealed a highly acute sense of theatricality and love for outré movies at a very young age), amusing, narcissistic, boring, compelling and, finally, quite moving. There are just as many stretches of questionable sincerity on Caouette's part as there are exhilarating moments--a joyous romp on the beach with mom or a beautiful, revealing childhood lip-synching take on "Frank Mills". The alt-rock soundtrack is superb and Caouette, a handsome, playfully schizophrenic star-in-the-making, is a talent to watch. **1/2 from ****

A $200-some-odd initial budget is no excuse for a dull, self-indulgent film that offers little or no insight into either a young man's life or his times.

I was initially drawn to the film by both the subject matter and the fact that John Cameron Mitchell (creator of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") was an executive producer. After seeing "Hedwig," I trusted Mitchell's artistic judgment completely---only to guess after seeing "Tarnation" that Mitchell must have been swayed by some sort of internal "pay it forward" guilt-trip to professionally help out a fellow young-ish gay filmmaker. (Disclaimer: I'm gay myself and very much appreciate gay or gender-bending film-making---when it's well done. This film, though, was like a psychedelic version of the incredibly gooey "Better Than Chocolate"---as in "I'm a sensitive gay person and I've been through a lot---love me!" Ick.)

Director/star Caouette apparently had about 15 minutes-worth of interesting home-video footage of himself as a child growing up with his once-institutionalized mother and oddball grandparents. And a few minutes of vanity shots of himself as a teenager with friends and as an adult with his boyfriend. The rest of the movie consists primarily of long, drawn-out filler---pseudo-freaky graphics and music superimposed over photos of Caouette posing. Not to mention the subtitles, especially at the beginning, that take 20 frames to relay a bit of information when they could have taken 2 or 3. (I read other reviews here before posting this; someone wrote that he/she saw people in the theater walking out during the first 10 minutes, and that they must have been either gay-intolerant or unfamiliar with non-mainstream film-making...My own guess is that they must have just been extremely bored with the by-now-clichéd MTV-style video sequence.)

Caouette's mother's story is truly tragic. Her own parents are tragic. Caouette's abusive upbringing in foster homes is tragic. But I know this only intellectually from the film, via the facts presented in the subtitles. Caouette isn't able to evoke an actual sense of pathos or understanding with either his photographs or his video interviews. How, for instance, did he escape the bizarre family cycle? Like Caouette, I also began hanging out in area punk clubs as a teen... It was an extremely visceral, life-changing feeling of acceptance for me. And for Caouette? He met a boyfriend. And a couple of club friends. You see a couple of bland photographs of them and maybe a minute of video of the guys mugging for the camera. Nothing else to give anyone viewing a sense of either the era or for what Caouette himself was feeling.

Then he moves to New York City. There, Cute Boyfriend David is very understanding and hugs Jonathan whenever he gets a (video-recorded) call from his weird mother. The two frolic in the snow. The utter vapidity makes me wish for the crazy mom and grandparents to re-appear. (They do, they do. But rather too late to salvage the film.) I also wonder why Caouette didn't reveal in the film that he'd had a kid with a girlfriend years earlier. Probably because this doesn't quite fit into the forced "My Sensitive Boyfriend Is All I Have After My Crazy Mother" theme. It would, though, have made much better film sense as part of the bigger picture of "dysfunctional family dynamics"(and been more honest, as part of a documentary).

Near the end of the film, Caouette tries hard to make us feel something by looking "sincerely" into the camera and telling us he hopes that he doesn't turn out like his mother, then wiping away a tear... He's trying desperately to be sincere, but after seeing earlier clips of his put-on antics, the effect is more schmaltzy than credible.

Caouette's actual family situation seems to have been very intense and disturbing, but again, you learn that primarily from the subtitles and not from the actual footage. He's barely been able to get anyone in his family to open up to him on camera (unless you count his mother's "pumpkin dance" near the end of the film, which seems more like anyone's unfortunate attempt to entertainingly mug for the camera rather than an example of "look at the tragedy that my mother has become"----since we've never learned what his mother was like to begin with).

The sparse actual footage of this film is put together with a lot of bells and whistles, but there's no "there" there. And certainly no family there, only an attempt at an "American Gothic" portrait that falls short due to its transparent attempts at being "hip" and convincing.