Review of Tarnation (2003) by Jennifer A — 21 Feb 2006

[b]Tarnation[/b], a documentary directed by Jonathan Caouette, was one of the most critically debated films to come out in many years. Caouette began documenting himself, and his family, at the tender age of 11. However this isn't your typical family. Caouette's mother Renee, once a promising teen model, began recieving shock treatments after falling off her parent's roof as a teen. Ultimately this lead to schizophrenia, among other mental ailments. Still Renee married and had a child. After the marriage failed, Renee was raped in front of young Jonathan, and was in and out of mental institutions. Jonathan spent time with Foster parents before his grandparents, Adolph and Rosemary, took him in. At the age of 11, Jonathan recieved a video camera and began documenting himself, as well as his family. Young Jonathan also spent time in numerous mental hospitals, started using drugs at an early age, and had already identified himself as gay. No doubt young Jonathan had a terribly fucked up childhood, and his examination of this life, past and present, and how his dysfunctional family affected him, is the basis of the film.

The film begins with a stage scene of thirtysomething Jonathan lying on a couch with his boyfriend when the phone rings. His mother Renee was in the hospital after a lithium overdose. I had to ask myself why would Caouette, in a documentary film, feel the need to set the tone of the film by staging a scene? Even if the scene was entierly accurate, I couldn't help but think it was done to illicit immediate sympathy for Jonathan. You see this happy, apparently normal young man but he can't escape his past because his past (in this case his mother) continues to haunt him. Here the story flashes back to his mother's tragic background. We see still photos of a beautiful young Renee as text provides her background info. Soon we get old video footage shot by Caouette himself, as well as his background information. Some of the clips are fascinating, especially an 11 year old Caouette in drag, impersonating a trailer park girl, but most are just shocking. How much footage the young Jonathan shot is a mystery to me, but what he did decide to show in this film is disturbing. Was this the voice of a deranged young mind, or just the tragic reality of a dysfunctional family? I suspect both, although I couldn't escape how mean spirited so much of the footage was. Was this a conscious choice, like I suspect, or was this all the material Caouette had? There wasn't any balance to the footage,and what was shown seemed like a vile attempt to mock those people (especially his mother) that he claimed to love. The best example of this was the very long sequence showing Renee and a pumpkin. This wasn't shot when Jonathan was a kid, it was more recent. It was excruciatingly painful to watch, and since it was obviously not edited to a shorter length, a signficant moment in generating yet more sympathy for Mr. Caouette. What bothered me most I guess was the lack of backstory other than text. We see one feeble attempt of Jonathan confronting Adolph about what happened to Renee and one time when he asks Renee himself, but that's it. And those attempts were less than subtle. The absence of Renee or Adolph or Rosemary discussing these events makes the film terribly unbalanced. Instead we basically only get footage of these three as crazed and unstable. Mental illness or not, these are people too, and to only show one side of them certainly reinforces my theory that Caouette only wanted the viewers to sympathize with his plight. Coming from a dysfunctional family myself (okay maybe not quite this dysfunctional) I couldn't help but see Caouette's self-important slant.

So what makes this film groundbreaking? Obviously chronicling one's family (and self) from a very early age through adulthood is something I have not seen before. The hallucinatory editing and insertion of stills, computer graphics, TV shows and film was unique. It played like a long MTV video. You could also argue that this gimmicky technique was used to mask the film's very obvious flaws. Even if the film has a unique look, that doesn't make it a good film.