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Shouldn’t this scene take place at the end of the movie?
It’s almost Valentine’s Day as Brett Mathews, the
gay son of a Mormon Bishop, and estranged from his family
for two years as a result, returns home at their request for
a reconciliation. Arthur Dong, a documentarian (
License to Kill, Coming Out Under Fire) accompanies him,
with the Mathews’ knowledge, to record the event. Brett passes
through a deplaning tunnel that is covered with multi-colored
paper hearts to emerge into the arms of his family. Unfortunately,
after the briefest of shots, that is virtually the last we
see of them, and not because this is a happy ending.
Within hours of his arrival, Mathews’ family refuses to
participate further in the film unless Brett agrees to be
deprogrammed to “cure” his homosexuality. They also insist
that Dong’s film must take an anti-gay stance or they won’t
agree to appear in it. Brett and Dong reject their ultimatum,
but how can they continue making Family Fundamentals
without this fundamental family?
These shocking events force the writer/director and his
subject into a similar dilemma. Each must make what he can
out of refusal, rejection, and lost opportunity. Dong uses
the family’s absence as a poignant commentary about their
relationship with their son. Brett’s mother makes one more
brief appearance as a pair of hands holding scissors as she
cuts Brett’s hair, and his father appears, from the waist
down, sweeping up the clippings. Then they disappear from
view altogether. Other family members have their faces digitally
blurred to protect their identities, as if they were actors
in pornographic film who did not want to be recognized. “I
feel like a fly on the wall in a shadow,” says Brett, as Dong
ingeniously films him solitarily wandering the family homestead,
without his family, in one scene after another.
They are not the only ones who face such frustrations. In
fact, everyone in Family Fundamentals, straight or
gay, flexible or fundamentalist, parent or child, ultimately
shares the same quandary: the fragility and the resiliency
of the need to love and be loved in the face of untenable
differences.
Family Fundamentals interweaves two additional stories
with Brett’s. Kathleen Bremner, her gay daughter
Susan, and her grandson David face the stress
that results when Kathleen and Susan work very different sides
of the fence about gay issues. Kathleen, a Pentecostal, runs
a support group for parents with gay children who believe,
as she does, that their children have joined the equivalent
of a cult. Their gay children, of course, believe the same
thing about their parents. Susan becomes an outspoken gay
activist.
Perhaps the most mind-bending story is that of Brian
Bennett, a gay Republican whose father-son relationship
with flaming homophobe Congressman Bob Dornan, for
whom he worked as chief of staff for years, is essentially
destroyed when Bennett comes out of the closet. They had once
been so close that Bennett had lived as a member of Dornan’s
family for six years, hiding his sexuality all the while.
Family Fundamentals is unfailingly absorbing as the
love-hate contradictions toxically proliferate. Brian remembers
coming out to Bob as a loving scenario. “Dornan said, ‘I have
always thought of you as my son, do you think this would make
a difference?’” and kisses him on the cheek. But Dornan recalls
the incident differently in a radio interview, downplaying
the kiss and claiming he castigated Bennett’s sexuality to
his face.
Dong himself insistently tells the gay children in the film
that their families really do love them, only to be met with
pained hesitation or disbelief. The movie truly succeeds in
putting the audience, with full feeling, into the midst of
these jagged contradictions.
Truthfully, I also felt disappointed by some aspects of
Family Fundamentals. The challenge of focusing on
a tension that has no apparent satisfactory resolution occasionally
makes the movie itself seem stuck, presenting essentially
the same predicament again and again. Each narrative highlights
the raw border these families occupy between love and rejection.
But the inability of any of them to change the situation,
as truthful as all three standoffs may be, creates the impression
that, despite its dramatic events, the film has nowhere left
to go because it faces the same impasse as its subjects.
There is also much less exploration of the nature of the
parents’ pain than of the children’s. Since Mathews and Dornan
refused to be interviewed, we see Brett’s and Brian’s sorrows
in intimate detail. Only fundamentalist Kathleen discusses
her disturbingly double-edged beliefs on camera. In a bizarre
twist on motherhood, she compares homosexuality to dealing
with a disobedient child: “You still love that child anyway.
You can’t stop them because they have their own free will.”
Dong is no biased propagandist and it’s not his fault if
Dornan and the Mathews refused his offer to air their views.
But the result is that any liberal-leaning viewer of the documentary
remotely familiar with these issues (like me, for example)
may simply find his or her own entrenched anti-fundamentalist
sympathies reinforced. I honestly felt that I didn’t learn
enough about the fundamentalists in the film to significantly
question my own assumptions, and I wonder if a fundamentalist
would have a similar response!
In addition, the gay children in the film aren’t really
pressed about some of the potentially disturbing contradictions
in their own beliefs, while the parents’ politics are frequently
questioned. Sure, Brian manages delightfully to “explain”
how he can be gay and a devoted Republican. (“We need
to be in a party that doesn’t want us.”) The additional reasons
for his devotion to a party that frequently leans to the right
about other issues, and which may make him less sympathetic
to liberal audiences in particular, never come up. Nor does
the audience hear why Brett was interested enough to join
the armed forces, a notoriously conservative group, from which
he was discharged due to his sexual orientation. The movie
gets on Katherine’s case for denying that her beliefs have
political consequences (“Stop asking political questions,
we want to show them Jesus’ love!”), the treats the gay children
as if their sexuality is the only thing that politically defines
them.
Family Fundamentals offers a fascinating portrait
of family love stretched to the breaking point. Why not test
what will probably be the largely liberal, urban market audience
for this film by presenting some aspects of the children’s
beliefs that might cause discomfort? Where do those “more
flexible” boundaries start to give way? How would I respond,
for example, if my child decided to become a fundamentalist
Christian who hated gays? It’s worth reversing the circumstances
to consider the limits of anyone’s “tolerance.”
—Ellen Whittier
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out
of 5
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