That tumult and unhappiness often lurk behind cheery suburban facades is a well-worn cliché, resurrected every few years by Hollywood in a manner that implies revelation. Though already deducible to anyone over the age of ten, American Beauty and its myriad ilk (including this past year’s Revolutionary Road) have now definitively established that – to use a relevant hackneyed saying – books cannot be judged by their covers, since outward appearances mainly reveal what a given subject wishes to project about itself. Yet if this truism is no longer an epiphany capable of shattering one’s sheltered worldview, it nonetheless can, when conveyed on a micro rather than macro scale, be quietly devastating, as evidenced by Morgan Dews’ Must Read After My Death. Revolutionary in neither form nor content, Dews’ documentary is – in a manner similar to Capturing the Friedmans and last year’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father – a non-fiction archival-elements collage, one that wields its trove of home movies, audio recordings, and still photographs to investigate the past, confess sins, and intimately, poetically evoke the banal tragedies of one family’s 1960s Hartford, CT life.
The first words heard in Must Read After My Death are those of Allis: “I am not a housewife.” It’s a statement of desperate defiance, as Allis is most surely a homemaker, married to insurance salesman Charlie, who drinks, has low self-esteem, and a mania about his domicile’s cleanliness. Allis, college-educated, married once before and fluent in four languages, gave up professional aspirations because she wanted to bear Charlie’s children. This she did – four in all, each one traumatically affected by their parents’ constant, vicious fighting, which drove more than one into therapy and which was brought on at least in part through their joint, troublesome decision (revealed obliquely by director Dews through snippets of Charlie and Allis’ Dictaphone recordings to each other) to have an open marriage. This thorny history is conveyed via a collection of 8mm films, transcripts, and audio tapes made by Allis, Charlie and their children which Dews first came upon after Allis’ 2001 death, and which he affectingly assembles into a haunting portrait of white-picket-fence familial disintegration. Echoes from an earlier age, his speakers’ tormented voices and images’ flickering appearance lend empathetic consideration to a tale of personal and parental hopes and failings, the director’s depiction given added resonance by nimble editorial overlapping and juxtapositions that evoke the depth of Allis and Charlie’s fury, resentment, doubt and self-loathing.
As Allis buckles under her husband’s chastisements, her daughter Anne flees home for marriage, son Chuck struggles with undiagnosed dyslexia and younger son Bruce is institutionalized, Must Read After My Death coalesces into an indictment of demanding, critical Charlie. However, in Charlie’s own naked admission of his paternal shortcomings, as well as in Allis’ growing antipathy for her psychologist’s belief that she’s to blame for her clan’s degeneration, Dews’ film refuses to simply settle for being a blanket censure of Charlie, expanding to also address the ways in which patriarchal societal pressures drove the family into a tailspin from which it could only ultimately recover through the death of one of its figureheads. Dews’ story may not have anything eye-openingly novel to say about how cultures, and idealistic notions about what happiness is and how it should be attained, compel people to embark upon unwanted paths for which they aren’t truly suited. Still, the formal deftness with which his documentary is crafted, aided by Paul Damian Hogan’s melancholic score and exemplified by a shot of departing cruise ships wedded to Allis discussing her marriage’s “communication breakdown,” nonetheless infuses Must Read After My Death with a mixture of lyrical tenderness and open-wound rawness that’s at once precise and universal.
