Must Read After My Death (2009)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on February 5, 2009 @ tonymacklin.net.

Playwright Luigi Pirandello once wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Filmmaker Morgan Dews has concocted a movie that could be called Six Family Members in Search of a Way Out.

Dews's film is titled Must Read After My Death, after words written and left behind by his grandmother Allis.

After Allis died in 2001 at the age of 89, Dews discovered 50 hours of audio tapes and 201 home movies that Allis, her husband Charley, and their four children had made. They were a revelation for him. They were a scramble of confessions, conversations, and rantings of an upper middle class family growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Hartford, Connecticut. It showed part of his family he never knew before.

The tapes and paraphernalia reveal the dysfunction, egos, hopes, delusions, and failure of a family.

The best thing about Must Read After My Death is that it remains roiling in the mind long after one sees it. Also Dews has made his movie with considerable technical skill.

He has compiled his materials with stylistic keenness, using editing, subtitles, and evocative photography to try to capture his subject. He utilizes photography of the Statue of Liberty, a bright peacock, a chipmunk, puppies, a car in the snow, and other shots to create evocative moments.

The focal figure of Must Read After My Death is Allis, but she is like a shuttlecock being buffeted between her pride and doubt. She obviously evolved, because at the end we learn that after Charley's death she lived independently for 30 years, but Dews muddles her development.

I was surprised to read in the press kit that Dews said he was "always close with my grandmother," because he doesn't let us in on that closeness in the movie. As a historian he may have wanted to keep a distance, but as an artist, distance is not necessarily an asset.

There's a stylistic clarity, but not a clarity of content. Dews's emphases on motivation are all over the place. Sometimes he just spills out his content, leaving more spillage than clarity.

A problem with Must Read After My Death is the characters -- the actual family members -- aren't very interesting. There's Allis. Allis was confused, but that doesn't mean her portrait should be. Dews could organize his materials to fuller effect. We don't want to be pushed, but guidance would be welcome. Interpretation matters.

Allis' husband Charley is banal, self-righteous, and overbearing. He is proud of his dancing skill, and he woos other women. He and Allis have an open marriage, so he selfishly tells her too much.

Charley travels to Australia on a lengthy business trip and that's why he communicates back home on the dictaphone.

One son Bruce screams a lot, and is institutionalized; another son Chuck has studying problems and complains a lot; and daughter Anne -- filmmaker Morgan's mother -- and the youngest son Doug wander about a lot.

They all gripe, brag, argue, bicker, and try to justify themselves.

Dews is protective of his mother in his movie. She may be the only sympathetic figure in the film; she certainly is the most attractive.

When Charley dies, Dews includes a shot of his mother with the words, "Anne suspected violence." Including just one line is mere coyness. If Dews's own mother thought violence was involved, he has to pursue that because it's part of the truth. He doesn't. It's a glaring omission.

There are other gaps. I didn't miss it, but there's not a word about religion. Surely the family had some reaction to religion. In one photo two nuns sit with the family That is it.

At the end words on screen tell that Anne became a spiritual counselor, but there is no evidence of that.

The villains of the movie are the psychiatrists who manipulate the family and eventually bring the vulnerable Allis to anger.

For better or worse, in Must Read After My Death, Morgan Dews has tapped into every viewer's mental attic.

Thank God my son didn't find a box of his grandmother's home movies, photos, and audio tapes.

Dews's grandmother has much in common with my mother. Both women were before their time. My mother was a buyer for a major department store in Philadelphia, but the times and her family cost her her career and her potential. Unlike Allis, but like Charley, she turned to the bottle.

Allis also thinks she has been robbed of her potential. She was college educated, and her husband was not -- a malady for the modern woman.

Allis (like my mother) expresses the anthem of many women of the 1950s and 1960s, when she says, "I am not a housewife. I have never been a housewife."

But unlike some other women of the 1950s and 1960s, Allis endured, and survived -- and may even have prevailed.

Perhaps the most relevant statement by Allis is when she says, "Maybe I am a nonconformist. I still don't believe in conformity."

I wish Dews had ended with that.

He does conclude with a wonderful image. Allis is singing a song, written by her first husband (who's he?) and does a dance like a bird.

In Must Read After My Death, Allis went on a hell of a journey. But her grandson is not as true to the journey as he might be.

For Dews, moments seem to matter most; but they dull the journey. He leaves a cluttered open road.

Morgan Dews lets his grandmother rest in pieces.