Tarnation Movie Review:


Every review, positive or negative, I’ve read of “Tarnation” has started with the same information: that it was made for a total cost to its maker
(Jonathan Caouette) of $218. That’s how much it cost for his tapes; the cameras (which vary over the course of the movie) were gifts, and he used
his boyfriend’s iMac to edit it, using the iMovie software. I generally prefer movies to be shot on film than digital cameras, but, on the other hand, “Tarnation” is proof that if people have a good movie in them, they can now easily get it made (distribution is trickier).

“Tarnation” is a documentary about the life of its maker, Caouette. When he was a child his mother was (wrongly, we learn) diagnosed with mental illness and taken away from him, and he had to live with his grandparents. As a teenager, he experimented with drugs and sex, then, grown up, he left his grandparents to go and live in Chicago, reuniting with his mother. Since he was a child, he has documented himself and his life on VHS, Betamax and digital.

Over the last few years, he gathered together all his footage, uploaded it onto the computer and, with encouragement from John Cameron Mitchell and Gus van Sant (both of whom get Executive Producer credits), edited it together (from over 160 hours of footage) into an effective and at times disturbing documentary, reminiscent of 2003’s successful “Capturing the Friedmans.” It was picked up for Sundance 2004, and has since been talked about endlessly among filmgoers, the talk usually being about the fact that it was made for $218 (‘dollars, not pounds!’ someone exclaimed to me).

Yes, it was made for $218. A lot of movies are made for that amount, and less, but (thankfully, in most cases), you and I will never see them. I
went into “Tarnation” because I was interested in its technique, and I was surprised at its unusual power. It is not a movie that, afterwards, you leave to return to normality; it stays with you, and leaves you questioning what ‘normality’ is.

Consider Jonathan’s monologues to the camera. As a boy, he dresses up in his mother’s clothes and talks in a Southern drawl, which seems amusing at
first until we listen to what he is saying (later, when the drugs have taken their toll on his mother, she has a long, wild speech into the camera and we
realise, chillingly, that she sounds exactly like Jonathan in these early scenes). He locks himself in rooms, and films himself taking drugs. Some
of this is not easy to watch (at least half a dozen people left the cinema at the screening I was at).

Inevitably, there are imperfections. There are too many montages (I’m beginning to think any montages in a movie is too many), and too much
information is given to the audience through titles on the screen. The latter mistake seems like laziness, and the former seems to be picked up from other American movies that make the same mistake.

Quibble, quibble. It’s my job to point out where movies go wrong, so there you go. I still think “Tarnation” is an excellent documentary, better than
many I’ve seen that cost hundreds of times as much. I don’t want to tell you too much about what happens in the movie because I didn’t know, and it
has some very powerful moments.

And Caouette, somehow, remains a mystery; for all his autobiographical detail, we can’t quite get to the bottom of his personality. I suppose the best clue is not in the movie; it’s the movie itself. I think that anyone using a camera to film so much of his life must have wanted somehow to distance himself from it.



Adam Whyte

More a personal cinematic scrapbook than a documentary, this astonishing film weaves together the life of 31-year-old director Caouette in a strikingly personal and emotional way. And it's also remarkable for the fact that he made it on his Mac with a production budget of around US $200. (John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant came on board later to help with post-production.)

When he hears that his mother Renee has taken a lithium overdose, Jonathan travels back through his life, assembling photographs and home movies to tell Renee's harrowing life story. Throughout her childhood in Houston her parents (Rosemary and Adolph) regularly institutionalised her, and her personality was altered through shock therapy. Even so, she married and became a mother, although her husband Steve left without knowing Renee was pregnant with Jonathan. As her shock therapy continued, Jonathan was raised by his grandparents--while dealing with his homosexuality, cinematic obsessions and his own drug-induced mental illness.

The film is constructed with a dreamlike feel that echoes (apparently) Caouette's own mental state; it looks beautiful, with ethereal cross-cutting, telling film and TV clips, lush colours and, most of all, extremely heightened emotions. The home movie footage is startlingly intimate, capturing the intricate structure of this deeply dysfunctional yet loving family and creating vivid movie characters out of each person. Rosemary emerges as the diva of the piece, a forcefully strong personality that infuses the entire film.

The journey these characters take is gripping and often disturbing. A lot of the film is difficult to watch, simply because it's so private! Long takes of Rosemary after her stroke and Renee after her overdose capture the reality of Jonathan's life--these are uncomfortable to see simply because other films would cut away long before Jonathan does. But he is clearly trying to understand himself and his history, and as a result he gives us a deeply meaningful glimpse into what it is that holds a family together and helps us survive whatever life throws at us. This is powerfully moving, revelatory, cathartic filmmaking. And it makes us extremely curious about what kind of narrative features Caouette might have up his sleeve.

Rich Cline

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