Wednesday, December 5, 2012

21: Housekeeping


 
            There are times when movies serve us well by providing us with answers, but it is invariably true that they serve us even better when they provide us with questions.  This past summer, I was excited when advertising for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) suggested that the film would answer the questions posed by the Alien series.  Upon seeing the film I was resolute in my contention that it not only failed to answer the aforementioned questions, but even went so far as to pose new queries.  Then, after several weeks, it occurred to me that Scott had done something marvelous with the franchise he kicked off in 1979; giving it new life after more than a decade of spin-offs, crossovers, and retreads.  By posing more questions – this time getting at even deeper elements of human nature – he enlivened that which, like his creatures, only seemed to be defeated.  It took his unique touch, that mix of thought and action that he does so well, to truly revive, and perhaps cap the franchise.   
            Fans of Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987) may be wondering by now what a 2012 big budget Sci-fi thriller has do with this relatively quiet and quirky dramedy from the Scottish director (his first North American film).  Nothing really, except that both of these films were helmed by directors that understood the power of questions to draw in an audience.  Scott’s film involves the origin of the human species, while Forsyth’s concerns the mysterious behavior of one of its members.  In a way, it too is an origin myth. 
            A narrator tells us the story of her youth, recounting the strange events that brought both her and her sister to be with their eccentric aunt, Sylvie (Christine Lahti).  At a young age they drove with their mother from Seattle to visit their grandmother.  Shortly after arriving at the geographically isolated town of Fingerbone, their mother took her own life.  When their grandmother passed away ten years later, two aged great aunts came to live with them in the house built by their grandfather.  He lost his life, we are told, years before in a train accident just outside of town that killed hundreds when the locomotive slipped off icy rails on a bridge, and then plunged to the depths of the frozen lake.  Like a congenial ghost, that bridge haunts the town, and the film.
When Sylvie arrives in Fingerbone, after years of transient existence, the girls, Ruth (Sara Walker) and Lucille (Andrea Burchill), are eager to learn more from her about the mother they barely knew.  Fingerbone has a way of making the world outside seem like an awfully exciting place, and Sylvie seems to have lived everywhere, at least for a time.  At first she seems drawn to the train station, eager to again take to the rails, but her affections for Ruth and Lucille convince her to remain as their caretaker.  Her quirks, a habit of collecting newspapers and tin cans, seem minimal at first, especially in the midst of the film’s most memorable sequence. 
Days after the geriatric aunts leave the girls in Sylvie’s care, the town floods.  The house, we’re told, is usually safe from the annual accumulation, but a late thaw leaves no option for runoff and for a time both aunt and nieces are forced to subsist in shin-deep water, donning their goulashes for each trip downstairs to the kitchen.  Initially, Sylvie’s nonchalant acceptance of these circumstances seems to be for the girls benefit, but as the water subsides it becomes clear that the state of the house is far from her mind.  The newspapers and tin cans begin to accumulate, and people in Fingerbone begin to talk.  Are these girls living in a healthy environment?  Ruth, who seems to care little for the world around her, doesn’t think anything is amiss, but as Lucille grows more concerned with her teenage social life, she begins to resent both her aunt and her sister.  Once, the two girls shared adventures together.  Now, Ruth prefers Sylvie as a traveling companion.  The two go on walks by the bridge and through the woods, crossing over mountain springs, and though they talk as they go, Sylvie remains mostly a mystery. 
Where all has she really been?  What caused her to leave?  Why did she stay away so long?  Was there a rift that tore the family apart after the train accident?  The answers to these questions are hinted at more than discussed, and Lahti has a way of making Sylvie’s reaction to questions about the past seem detached and defusing all at once.  The inquiries seem to bounce off of her and fade into the folds of the film, like the locomotive into the lake, sinking ever deeper with each subsequent attachment that glides off the rails.             
            Most people see a film that poses larger questions – something like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) – and initially recoil.  It requires more than two free hours to view and to process such a movie, and frankly we are losing our attention span as a culture.  It takes the ability to create and to reflect on critical and nuanced thoughts in order to digest such pictures.  We’ve bought into the idea that has been sold to us by Hollywood that movies exist solely for our enjoyment, and can be forgotten in the interim between the moment when we leave the theatre and the real moneymaker, the DVD release.  Housekeeping is a film of small questions rather than big, sweeping ones, but in the time I spent with it, and for some time thereafter, they were questions that mattered.  Not a masterpiece, but a wonderful look at a life different than my own, and yet similar in so many ways.

Language: English
Runtime: 117 Minutes
Available for streaming @amazon.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off

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