SXSW: Uncanny sibling chemistry in "Our Father"

by Jason Adams

As a person without any close siblings (I have a half-sister who I wasn't raised with) the tricky alchemy of sibling-hood often escapes me. I watch my friends who do have close relations with their brothers or sisters with some fascination. It's not quite a foreign Twin Language every time but it might as well be, to me, the weird ways you people relate and the fiery push-pulls of it; the way you can be meaner to a person you were raised beside than anybody else on earth and then turn and snap fangs at anybody trying to do the same at that person. 

But, like too many things in life, I've learned the most about those relationships from watching them in the movies...

We can probably safely plunk Bradley Grant Smith's wise and funny new film Our Father, playing right now at SXSW, right onto the Real Good pile. And it's also safe to say the big reason why is casting. Baize Buzan and Allison Torem, as estranged sisters Beta and Zelda, are uncannily excellent at filling in the blanks between these two; they're so good at being soft echoes of one another that I actually had to check IMDb at one point to make sure the movie wasn't Freaky Friday-ing me and it was the same actress playing both roles.

Our Father works because of them and their chemistry, but it's also got a lovely small story to tell and it tells it with great grace and humor. More surprisingly there's a perfectly calibrated lack of sentimen. That irritating treacle can come hard and fast in stories about families reuniting because of a death, but Our Father swats at any such inclinations. It's not missing in a sarcastic way but in a blessedly realistic way that refuses to package life's sloppiness with cutesy little bows. Beta and Zelda are both fucked up, in their own ways, but the world gives them reason. Plenty and then some.

It's the death of their father that brings them back together, and the discovery soon thereafter that he had a brother they never knew about; the passage where this discovery is made, in their father's airless tomb of a home as everyone rifles through his drawers for goodies, is where I knew this movie was going to be actually special -- what might have played as a goof is given the proper space and time to breath, the heaviness of the moment becoming as tangible as the dust on a half-dead plant dying under a blue sunbeam. Our Father is serious, funny, and seriously funny. It's well worth seeking out.

Comments

[Charles O]

hope it gets distribution!