Phyllis and Harold, now playing at the Coolidge Corner, is a documentary about director Cindy Kleine’s parents. There is more time spent in close-up in this movie than anything else I can remember, and, if I didn’t know how I’d feel about that before, I do now: I don’t like it. Too much time spent in close-up is like watching a movie in the second row – after a while you stop really noticing, but you’re never really comfortable with it. By using it almost exclusively in her interviews, the director makes the dynamic range of emotion very thin, ranging only from “intense” to “somewhat more intense”, depending on the subject being discussed. This turns out to be psychologically tiring.
The documentary has other problems, mostly stemming from a lack of (metaphorical) focus. Several issues are hinted at, but not discussed in depth, such as her mother’s inability to recall whether she had an affair before or after she was married, or her father’s lewd behavior early in the marriage. Picking one theme and digging into it might have made the movie about more than a single couple’s troubled life. In the post-screen conversation with the Kleine and in the movie, it was suggested that the mother was trapped in marriage by social convention and the father’s controlling nature. It was the only suggestion that this story might be representative of a general sense of imprisonment of women in her generation, but it’s discussed for only a few minutes.
Just as Kleine only hints at the reasons and dimensions of her parents’ unhappiness, she blithely drops in bombs of her own without much examining them, mentioning that her nanny seemed more like her “real mother”, and suggesting that her mother had conscripted her and her sister in a battle against their father. These are said in passing, and it seems as though Kleine herself doesn’t realize the severity of what she is saying.
I think the lesson here is to play in your own backyard only with caution. Use “fair and balanced” just as you would if you were making a documentary about someone else’s family. And make sure that somewhere in your footage there is a clear story with broader implications than that your parents were unhappy jerks.
