A 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes, for this?? And awards, really??
I guess I’m going to go out on a limb and be the only person on Earth to say that Jonathan Caouette’s 2004 documentary Tarnation is like watching someone masturbate for 90 minutes. The gay son of a small-town Texas woman suffering from schizophrenia (I’m not even sure Caouette ever tells us her diagnosis in the film. I remember one part in which he says his mother, Renee, was in and out of hospitals, but doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her.), Caouette certainly has rich subject matter to work with. He was abused in foster care and mostly raised by his grandparents. And as a lifelong exhibitionist, evidently, Caouette has countless hours of film from when he was growing up, some of it in shirtless scenes at age 11. Dave and I wondered who the hell was filming this homoerotic footage? We never find out.
Who’s filming young Jonathan is just one of many questions that go unanswered in this thing. In the most annoying and frustrating scene, near the end of the film, Caouette confronts his grandfather (who I only found out was suffering from Alzheimer’s from one of the stories I read about the movie just now) about letting doctors give Renee shock treatments when she was a child and her charges that they abused her. It’s one jump cut after another as Grandpa isn’t given the opportunity to answer a single question. Maybe he didn’t answer, maybe he just stuttered or sighed or shook his head, but at least let us see that, don’t just cut over and over as though only your questions are important.
It wasn’t only the manipulative editing in the scene that bothered me, however. Jonathan is understandably angry that his mother endured shock treatment, but have some compassion for your grandparents given the era, for God’s sake. They were lower-middle-class Texas parents in the 1950s; a lot of people went along with doctors’ recommendations for such treatment then because they didn’t know any better. I think it’s unfair to judge their decision through a modern lens, as painful and unfortunate a decision as it was.
And some of the accusations Jonathan hits his grandfather with are pretty bizarre. Renee had told her son that her parents had beaten her and locked her in closets and that she suspected they weren’t really her parents at all. Paranoid delusions that your parents aren’t really your parents and are trying to hurt you are really, really common among people suffering from schizophrenia. Does Caouette know that? Who fucking knows. He appears to take what Renee has told him as fact. Since Caouette was raised by his grandparents, maybe his belief in her stories stem from abuse he suffered at their hands as well? Again, who knows?
I realize there won’t be pat or easy answers to Caouette’s question, “Why is my family so fucked up?” But he cold have at least let his grandfather try to answer his questions.
Also from the New York mag article: “Although Caouette admits to staging portions of Tarnation, he doesn’t feel like the dramatizations discount the emotional impact of the film. ‘Really, what is truth?’ Caouette asks. ‘I can say my truth from my point of view, but I bet my mother’s point of view is going to be completely different.’ Winter agrees. ‘Jonathan is able to composite drama into a narrative form that gets you right into the story.'”
Am I the crankiest person on Earth or is that last quote a load of shit? “…composite drama into a narrative form”? Jesus Christ. But anyway, I agree with Caouette’s statement here, but I think that the reason this film doesn’t work for me is that Caouette is too selective in what he chooses to reveal. He brings up all this crazy shit that happens in his family and then flits off into an artsy montage of pictures of himself. Like when he says that he called Adult Protective Services after he sees the conditions his mother and grandfather are living in but we never see them and never hear of this again. And while he leaves out a great many details, he lingers over old footage in segments that become pointless, tedious and even annoying.
New York magazine wrote “By all odds, Tarnation should have been an unwatchable, masochistic morass, but Caouette’s love for the broken Renee—which is the true subject of the film—is awe-inspiring.” No, you were right the first time, it is almost unwatchable. And Renee SHOULD have been the subject of the film, but she is merely peripheral in Caouette’s world view.
I am still reeling from the absurdity of the great reviews of this movie, but I should say that the most persistently annoying element of Tarnation is its self-indulgence, as I said initially. A preponderance of the film is a montage of stills in which Caouette poses. “Here’s me looking hot with a shirt on,” “here I am looking hot with no shirt,” “And here I am looking hot with long hair,” “And here I am in the backyard with short hair, note my piercing blue eyes…” Ok, you’re a good-looking guy, Jonathan, we get it. Gus Van Sant executive produced this and I kept thinking, “Thanks, Gus. I know he’s hot and all, but come on. Are you fucking serious?” Tarnation was three hours long at one point, before Gus and some other mentors gave Caouette a crash course in editing, so I guess I at least have to express gratitude to Van Sant for that.
Here’s a trailer for it. It does look interesting, doesn’t it? Some of it is. Maybe more of it will work for you than it did for me and Dave.
Obsessive-Repulsive 