Prodigal Sons

Kimberly Reed was understandably nervous about coming home to her small Montana town. She had grown up as Paul McKerrow: high school quarterback, popular scholar, handsome and well-respected male. She then left this life behind to realize her identity as female, and was now returning for a class reunion--the first time her childhood friends would know her as a woman. Armed with a camera, supported by her girlfriend, and braced for an onslaught of transphobia, Reed plunged in.

And then nothing really happened. A few explanations were in order for a few bemused guests, but the vast majority of Reed's small town Montana classmates were perfectly cordial and accepting. Thus begins Reed's 2008 documentary Prodigal Sons.

Although Reed's homecoming is disappointingly lacking in narrative interest, Reed finds plenty of documentable conflict in her estranged brother Marc, who lost part of his brain in a car crash and is now mentally unstable. Reed films herself asking Marc for fashion advice and alternately encouraging/discouraging Marc's childhood reminiscence; Marc is seen trying to be accommodating in spite of his obvious discomfort. Until his mood swings hit and he becomes a total jackass--though even then, he's more concerned with Kim's high school adoration than her status as a woman.

So goes the film: Kimberly either expects or invites opposition to her gender and receives none; Marc deals with a crippling mental disorder, alienates everybody, and plunges into paranoia and despair. While both stories are compelling in their own right, they do not compliment each other. Reed's primary misstep is to give her own story as much weight as Marc's: I have no doubt that Reed has overcome a great deal of hardship in her transition, but her struggle is told rather than shown. What is shown is a sad, jealous man losing his mind--the plight of stable, well-adjusted, transsexual Reed seems terribly bourgeois in comparison.

Ultimately, this particular work of transgender cinema would be quite a bit more effective if it were a little bit less concerned with its status as such. Reed obviously hoped for a reconciliatory homecoming story--see title--but what she got was the sad deterioration of her still-jealous-about-high-school brother. If she'd had the discipline to tell his story rather than hers, she'd have a better film for it. -TK 10/23/10

The trailer for this film intrigued me a great deal. When I got the opportunity to see it my expectations were rather high because I'd found the trailer so interesting. Then the film started, and I felt a little deflated thinking this isn't what I was expecting. And then something happened to me as I was watching it . . . I began to have a very visceral reaction to it. I am one of those people who does feel that many documentaries take advantage and capitalize on the exploitation of their subjects. But the people who fill out the frames of "Prodigal Sons" are human beings trying to tell the truth. The film never feels exploitative, quite simply it feels honest. It is a brave film that the courageous director, Kimberly Reed, has made and it deserves to be seen by a vast audience. I find it odd that some would narrowly consider this film "another one of those gay docs about members of the trans-gendered community". Although one of the subjects may be trans-gendered, it is not a film about the trans-gendered lifestyle. It is a film about the ghosts that haunt us and the ways we try to justify ourselves and our identities to a world of people when really the only thing that matters is the peace we make with ourselves in our own lives and with the people we love and who are brave enough to love us in return. Do NOT miss this film . . . I've only seen it once, and even though I want to see it many times again, I feel it's message imprinted on mind and I will never forget it.

For the first time, I am editing a review after further reflection and taking away its stars. I can no longer say I even like this movie. It is mean-spirited in an underhanded way that Kim Reed is probably not even aware of.

We are so used to seeing the LGBT character in a movie as the victim that we are blindsided when that character is in reality the victimizer. Reed used this movie to attack and expose her adopted brother Marc's truly horrific mental problems, which did nothing good for him but a lot bad.

The moral problem is that Kim is the strong one in that relationship, the gorgeous, charismatic one who all her life had extraordinary advantages and adoration from everybody in her world. Her triumphant return to her home town as a woman and her total acceptance by everybody but Marc makes it obvious that she still operates from a position of extraordinary power in that world.

Kim is NOT the disadvantaged, abused one in this movie: Marc is. The fact that his disadvantages were not in any way the fault of Kim or anybody else in the extraordinarily compassionate McKerrow family, rather the fault of the genes he got from his birth parents, does not excuse anything. She was not abused by Marc as they grew up together, so she had no excuse for exposing his troubles to the world. It was cruel and grossly self-serving: nobody ended the movie better off than when it started except for Kim herself.

Hers is a fascinating story, but instead of sharing HERSELF with the audience, she turned the camera onto her poor, tortured brother whose only offense EVER was to be jealous of her vastly superior advantages. By doing so she inflamed his problems beyond endurance. If she had just left him alone and told her own story instead of his, we all would be very much better off - especially Marc, but even Kim herself, because it would have forced her to descend from her tower of invulnerability and expose herself instead of her poor, tortured, fundamentally innocent brother.

This is a magnificent documentary, the sort of film that reminds one why documentaries are made. The maker clearly thinks that she knows the general shape of the film at the beginning - returning to her hometown after transitioning to being a woman, about to see her old high school friends for the first time with her new body and true identity - but instead finds that it's much more about her brother and his ongoing identity crises - who is he, who is he becoming - than about her own questions of place and home. Kim seems to answer for herself the age-old question of whether one can or cannot go home again but finds that the question is being raised over and over again for the people around her who face their own issues of loved ones lost and gained.

This film avoids any sense of predictability or forced sentiment, continually surprising the viewer and rewarding attention to detail, both by the audience and the makers. Absolutely magnificent. It will surprise from beginning to end.