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"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace
in his home," spoke Johann
von Goethe. However, I doubt if von Goethe could have
imagined the extent to which Chris Smith’s (American
Movie) new documentary, Home Movie, would reveal
the truth in this statement. Many times in my life, I have
come across a person—a stranger—who glowed with such vivid
individualism that I immediately wanted to know what they
were really like—what they were like in their own element.
If the old adage about a home as the extension of one’s being
is true—and after seeing this film, I am certain that it is—what
better way to investigate interesting people than by examining
their houses? That’s exactly what Smith does. A New Age Topeka
family, an alligator keeper from the bayou, a Japanese TV
star, a Chicago inventor, and two intriguing cat-lovers comprise
the cast of this documentary. But their homes are the true
stars, proving beyond a doubt that the trek you take through
the space another occupies is often a trek into the center
of that which defines them.
Bill Tregle runs a Louisiana alligator farm with his
father. At first glance, your worst prejudices are realized.
He is, as you might expect such a man to be, a muscle-bound
and tattoo-laden brute from the bayou whose aggressiveness
is only challenged by the ’gators he handles. But once inside
his one-room floating lair, an unexpectedly reserved side
of Tregle spills forth. With the help of Tregle’s powerful
sentimentality for the objects within his house, his tough-guy
skin slides off, and beneath it we find the real Tregle—a
man of quiet internalization whose swamp life does not center
on taming reptiles, but rather on the comfortable solitude
he finds as he playfully challenges nature.
In Chicago lives a more urban eclectic. A man boiling over
with ideas for inventions of every kind, Ben Skora
wrestles with gadgets. With the press of a few buttons on
his telephone, the living room in Skora’s all-electric house
completely rotates. Perhaps because he wanted someone (or
something) to share his high-tech home with, Skora even designed
and built a fully functional, life-size robot named Arok
that he can manipulate via remote control. And as if Skora’s
technological eccentricities aren’t enough to digest, he also
maintains an intriguing interest in the world of psychic phenomenon
and the paranormal.
Smith’s well constructed and oddly entertaining documentary
also takes you to the home of Ed Peden and his wife
Diana. The interior of the couples’ home resembles
an ordinary ranch house in Topeka, Kansas—commonplace in every
way. But once on the outside, their extraordinary free-spiritedness
becomes clear. Their home is built in the inter-woven concourses
of a converted, underground missile complex. Now, the two
hippies are free to host drum circles (which they do) anytime
they want… even during a nuclear winter.
Bob Walker and Francis Mooney happily confess
that they have devalued their California home by tens of thousands
of dollars since they installed a system of raised, miniature
footbridges and cut cubby-holes and passages through their
walls. No, Bob and Francis are not trying to live in the fashion
of cliff-dwelling Indians, but rather have outfitted their
home with these additions in order to provide all that they
can for their most prized possessions: their cats. And while
they purr away in their feline fortress, Linda Beech,
a Japanese TV icon from the ’60s, is comfortable in her mammoth
tree house, completely isolated in the Hawaiian jungle. Giving
up sit-com stardom to become a grief therapist, Beech loves
the intangible fortitude she absorbs from her arboreal abode—which,
by the way, runs solely off hydro-electricity from the nearby
waterfalls. While every vantage from the home offers a riveting
view of the forests, she does have one cheerful complaint:
She can’t keep photographs because the jungle’s extreme moisture
inevitably destroys them.
Not to worry Ms. Beech. Chris Smith has taken care of the
photo problem for you. Indeed, Smith’s film succeeds in doing
what many have argued is the lost purpose of the celluloid
medium: capturing, in a single, transcendent frame, the essence
of an object or of a person. While Smith’s beautifully unobtrusive
yet energizing style of documentary deserves much praise,
I must save some veneration for the subjects themselves. These
characters are fabulous charmers—the kind of people you want
to know increasingly more about, even at the expense of your
grasp on normality. And their homes are overwhelming.
This film is wildly entertaining, hysterically quirky, instantly
engaging, and in many ways, raises the bar for documentarians
everywhere. Without exploiting the eccentricities of his subjects
(a la MTV’s or HBO’s pseudo-documentaries), and without hubris,
Smith powerfully makes his point. The home—like a good film—when
it’s the pure extension of its creator, can chasten vice,
guide virtue, conjure pleasure from solitude, and at once,
lend grace to genius.
—W. Duke Greenhill
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