Will Penn gets familiar with Jim Jarmusch's latest feature.
Whenever I watch a film about family, I think of George Bernard Shaw's famous advice: "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." In many ways, film is a cathartic medium for the specific and formative experiences of family. C'mon C'mon explores the specific angst of a child navigating inexpressible pain; Lady Bird strikes the specific tension between a daughter and an anxious, overbearing mother; The Farewell examines the conflict between cultural values in global families. At the very least, if we can't recognise our own behaviours in these films, we might learn something about the undertows, the ways that families shape, and are shaped by, us. But if you do see yourself in any of these dynamics, prepare to be in floods of tears.
Where Father Mother Sister Brother sets itself apart is in the multiple ways it captures how family dynamics differ. Divided into three ambitious vignettes, it explores the mundane in a similar vein to Paterson, across rural America, Dublin, and Paris. In the first, Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their estranged and eccentric father (Tom Waits). As they pull into his dilapidated but picturesque rural driveway, Jeff remarks that you can choose your friends and lovers – but not your family. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, expresses a great and terrible truth beneath it. In his limited screen time, Tom Waits is a delight, exuding a character so utterly lived-in and irredeemable that we can't help but laugh.
Through a series of impressionistic shots and ambient guitars composed by the director himself, we are transported into Dublin's grey skies. A mother awaits her daughters for tea, telling a confidant over the phone that this is the only day of the year they fully congregate. When they arrive, the terseness and formality that fills the house is stifling. Lilith (Vicky Krieps) interrupts Timothea's (Cate Blanchett) work announcement, and the excellent performances leave a great deal unsaid; namely, the distance between parent and adult child, implied but never fully articulated. The recurring motifs of water, red, and Rolexes tie the story to the first vignette; however, the opportunities for dialogue tend to be far too on the nose, and serve as a prime example of the film telling rather than showing. When Lilith announces she must leave, remarking that the time has flown because she's had such a good time, the moment feels underdeveloped, too similar in register to what came before, and a missed opportunity to let the emotion speak for itself.
The final vignette is a refreshing palate cleanser. Where the previous two focus on the uncomfortable ways in which parents hide from, or domineer, their children, this one places two siblings on an equal footing. We meet Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat), punk twins in Paris sorting through their recently deceased parents' estate. As they wander through the streets, they fall into conversation about family and water – the film's recurring motifs. There is a genuine sense of the closeness that siblings can find in shared grief. However, as they pull down the shutters on a dusty storage unit, one can't help but feel there is more left on this thematic bone.
And it ought to be illegal to film car scenes like that.
There is much to admire in Jarmusch's filmmaking: its modesty, its commitment to the texture of real life, and its endeavour to treat its subjects with kindness and humour. Yet one has the unfortunate impression of never moving far past Driver's introductory aphorism. The film feels both too broad and too specific; its runtime does not allow its myriad performers to fully flex their acting chops, and the interpersonal dynamics, as a result, feel too obvious.
Jarmusch seems intent on examining dysfunctional families exclusively, which is entirely valid. But I think of what pioneering psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote of implied power dynamics within troubled families, and wonder whether there is enough time to explore these subtleties across three short vignettes:
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
While the film's breadth is ambitious, it also fails to examine family in any pluralistic sense. The one benefit of comparing families side by side would be to illuminate the ways they differ. Yet, the recurring motifs and preoccupation with the nuclear family gesture towards a singular understanding of what family is. But family, as we know, is anything but singular. Driver might as well have said, "Families are like assholes; everyone has one," and it would have provided much the same thematic grounding.
So give me an explosive, drunk, deranged, politically incorrect family Christmas. At least it would make a nice change of pace.
Father Mother Sister Brother is available to stream now on Mubi.
