Week of February 7, 2007, Issue #590
FILM
Everything seemed normal at 51 Birch Street
BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
The award-golden rays of Little Miss Sunshine have thrown the spotlight back on the family film, which Hollywood has turned into the dysfunctional family film, rarely forgetting the “fun” part.
We’ve been meeting the Fockers and ritzing it up with the Tenenbaums for years. Over in the drier world of documentaries, Capturing the Friedmans and Tarnation recently tossed us some loopy throwbacks to the home movies that North American families have long been making as, an unreal universe away, Tinseltown was building picket-fence sets and casting for desperate housewives.
But even as the title of a documentary, 51 Birch Street sounds like a tepid family film. The family we meet seems as ordinary as the Port Washington house they live in. Mother Mina tells her son not to shoot her unflatteringly from the bottom of the stairs as she goes into the bathroom. The son, documentary-maker Doug Block, admits that the footage of his parents was never meant to become one of his films—he was just trying to “capture them for posterity.”
A few months on, though, Mina is no longer at the top of those plain wooden stairs. Three months later, father Mike is remarried—to former secretary Carol “Kitty” Duffy. They are soon sorting through the house’s belongings as they prepare to sell the house and move to Florida. 51 Birch Street, Mike and Mina’s for five decades, and the childhood home of Doug and sisters Karen and Ellen, is fading into the past.
The beauty and power of 51 Birch Street lies in its suggestion that even seemingly banal marriages hide profound depths and rich paradoxes. In his exploration of a vanished relationship that he took for granted, Doug Block forces himself, and us, to reflect on the mixed moods of our own families and relationships.
Block can no longer be a child and see Mina as just his mother. He tentatively starts to read through her boxes of diaries, discovering a woman who chafed against being stuck at home with her children in the suburban-homemaker 1950s, as Mike, a WWII veteran, lost himself in his work as an engineer. As Mina told Doug years later, “If a woman didn’t get married in my generation, she was dead.”
In families, especially, perceptions are relative. Mike initially seems reticent and repressed but comes alive in surprising ways as Doug tries to understand how Mina saw him and how Mike saw her. At the heart of marriage is not simply fidelity but an abiding faith in the other, a faith that may slip and strain but can return. We see, read and hear more of Mike and Mina, but there is still much that can’t ever be totally understood. (And what about Mina’s “desire to be known,” as her friend Natasha notes; what about all her poetry and prose? her work as a peace activist even as she was battling on the home front?)
This is a superbly paced and edited film, perfectly scored by music collective Machine Head. The camerawork is handheld, vivid and intimate, only interrupted by b&w snapshots, highlighted excerpts from Mina’s typed diary pages or footage from Doug’s supplemental job, filming weddings where the faces of the brides and grooms often seem hard to decipher. While they may seem a little guarded on film, Doug’s family offers thoughtful, reflective answers. The film suggests that any of us could turn our gaze on our parents’, or our own, public personas, trying to find the shifting truths beneath the masks of old photos and family trees.
51 Birch Street returns the family film to its gnarled, stubborn roots. Even in its final moments, in the darkness of the non-descript suburban street on a late autumn night, Block reminds us that the seemingly mundane, right at our dinner tables, can offer its own special, bittersweet poetry. V
Fri, Feb 9 & Sun, Feb 11 (9 pm);
Sat, Feb 10 & Mon, Feb 12 (7 pm)
51 BIRCH STREET
Written & Directed by Doug Block
Starring Mike Block and Mina Block
Metro Cinema, $8