Few people I know saw Patrick Wang’s languid drama In the Family when it screened at the Music Box in April, probably because it runs close to three hours. The “slow cinema” movement may be a cause celebre for cinephiles, and civilians may find the idea of long, studious takes intriguing, but few of them will actually pull the trigger on a three-hour movie unless it’s really something special. In the Family is extraordinary, and it casts a spell on the big screen that can’t be reproduced in your living room. So I’m glad Facets Cinematheque is bringing it back for a series of Saturday and Sunday afternoon shows through September, with the filmmaker attending on Sunday, September 9. I can only hope more people will slow themselves down enough to experience it.
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Much has been written about the film’s social politics; it tells the story of a gay man in small-town Tennessee who loses his lover to a car accident and custody of their six-year-old son to the dead man’s sister. But what really lingered with me was how beautifully Wang captured the feel of middle-class life in the modern south. Hollywood movies always get it wrong: to a screenwriter in LA, the south is either antebellum homes bursting with greenery or blue-lit, junk-strewn yards in the bayou. Even inspired regional filmmakers like David Gordon Green (George Washington), Matthew Porterfield (Putty Hill), and Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild) have tended to focus on the ramshackle poor, searching for folklore. But Wang truly understands life in small-town Martin, Tennessee, where In the Family takes place, and his story of prejudice and injustice hits even harder for the fact that he finds so much good there as well.
Other shots are wordless but so beautifully staged that they’re eloquent in their emotion. When Cody is critically injured in a car accident, Joey and Chip are summoned to the hospital along with Cody’s mother, Sally (Park Overall); his sister, Eileen (Kelly McAndrew); and her husband, Dave (Peter Hermann). But because Joey has no status as a family member, he’s prevented from seeing Cody; the nurse is visibly disgusted by him. Soon after, Wang shoots through a closed window of the waiting room, the image sliced into fifths by hanging vertical blinds and cars zooming by on the soundtrack. Joey stands extreme right, his back to the camera, as a doctor and another nurse approach him, and when the nurse looks to the ground, it becomes obvious that Cody is dead. Stunned, Joey doesn’t move a muscle; the doctor and then the nurse walk out of frame, and for more than 20 seconds—which seems like an eternity—Joey stands there in shock, before little Chip shows up at bottom left, searching his father’s face for answers.
Directed by Patrick Wang
