As I write this review of What They Had, an intimate and piercing film about a crisis in which a family must decide whether or not to place their beloved mother in a memory care facility, Sandra Day O’Connor, former Supreme Court justice appointed by President Reagan, announced that at 88 she has dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.
What They Had, a heartache of a movie, reveals the fissures and long-simmering resentments as the family deals with the matriarch’s steady decline into an essentially disappearing life. What They Had is, as the title suggests, an exploration of a life vanishing into the mist before their very eyes. In fact, the opening scene is of a nightgown-clad older woman shuffling out the front door and into a Chicago snowstorm, the screen filled with snow that obliterates her footprints and hides her altogether as she wanders down an alley. She disappears even as we watch.
Blythe Danner as Ruth and Hilary Swank as Bridget are perfection in their projection of a mother and daughter caught in a dilemma in which no choice is the right one, where doing anything is cruel, where doing nothing is absurd. Bridget has returned to Chicago from the west coast to assist her brother Nicky (Michael Shannon) and father Bert (Robert Forster) as all reluctantly let go of a life no longer recognizable, considering the mother’s decline. Adding to the tension is Bridget’s relationship with her own college-age daughter Emma (Taissa Farmiga), who has accompanied her back to Chicago, heightening the guilt and swirling family dynamics.
Writer and director Elizabeth Chomko based this film on her grandmother’s diagnosis and subsequent challenge to the family that loved her, yet had to watch as she became an empty shell.
And that’s the exact description of this tender film, maybe one of the most articulate and sensitive movies made for adults that I’ve seen in a long time. It encapsulates that wide range of emotions — anger, confusion, frustration, fear, bewilderment, terror, heartbreak, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, trust, shame, pity, guilt, anticipation, and humor too, and love — we all experience when facing family or friend in the throes of a disease that strips away memory, experience, history.
The beauty — and I don’t use that word frivolously — the beauty of this film is its humanity, warts and all, as people seek to understand and support and guide and survive in the face of a cruel dismemberment of our memory.
Who are we without our memory? Are we anybody?
The camera lingers over photographs and home movies; Kodak shots and Kodachrome evidence that Ruth had an identity now reduced to a locket around her neck to remind her who she is and who that man is across the table from her.
Every member of the family has his and her baggage, and maybe the most freighted is Bert, the father, a devout and overbearing Catholic who cannot tolerate his adult children’s separation from his worldview. It has corroded Bridget, who escaped into a lifeless marriage, and it has corroded Nicky, who can never please his father. Even as they’re trying to decide what to do with Mom, the rest of the domestic conflicts keep resurfacing. Life does not stop when dementia intervenes, so the family must still deal with parent-child dynamics, sibling rivalry, fear of commitment, measurement of a marriage without the bells and whistles, sulky adolescents, combative middle-agers and geriatrics in denial.
Danner must be both there and not there. How possibly can an actor do that? Yet she is sublime in her portrayal of a woman who greets everybody, and I mean everybody, with “There’s my baby!” yet also shows herself a little girl, still trying to find the train to take her to her childhood home. At times, the only tool for survival is to laugh at the absurdity of her comments and behavior. It’s horror and humor in one breath when Ruth makes a pass at Nicky, her own son, yet it may be that clue that finally convinces Bert that something must be done. Swank has never been better than embodying the character of a guilt-ridden daughter taking on the role of parenting her parent, all the while navigating the rough shoals with her browbeating father and irritating brother.
This script and these performances are raw with authenticity. Every tear you will shed is genuine.
Ben Wiley taught literature and film at St. Petersburg College. At USF/Tampa, he was statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are film, books, and kayaking Florida rivers. He also writes the BookStories feature in Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.
This article appears in Nov 22-29, 2018.
