Is having an extraordinary life a good enough reason to make a movie? Is an extraordinary life a good movie in and of itself? Jonathan Caouette’s family life is one long train wreck of abuse and mental illness, both his and his mother’s, and he’s been recording that train wreck since he was 11 years old.

Tarnation is an uber-documentary. The level of Caouette’s documentation of his life is astonishing. To create his ultra-low-budget movie he wove a history out of family photos and home movies, answering machine tapes, Super-8 footage of his journal entries or early acting and directing efforts. It’s a lot of material and Caouette achieves a phenomenal feat of editing. For example, for the journey from NYC back home after his mother’s 2002 lithium overdose, he puts us clearly in the region just by footage of the car trip—the ranch-style houses, refineries, and scrub woods are a perfect distillation of a certain area of Texas.

It’s easy to see why Tarnation attracted the attention of its executive producers (John Cameron Mitchell & Gus Van Sant). It’s emotional, it’s raw, it holds nothing back. This is a real life, one that has not always been pretty and that has the potential at any moment to not be pretty again. Yet the presentation of this unlovely life is astonishingly lovely indeed. In place of voiceover, Caouette uses often-lengthy title cards that sometimes approach poetry, and mighty fine background music. Of necessity, it’s nearly all montage, with a semi-hallucinatory, trance-inducing look.

Yes, Tarnation is indeed something special and wonderful to look at, but it’s still just a glorified peep show, the logical extreme of the reality shows and talk shows that litter the TV landscape right now. Only its unusually attractive presentation separates it from any number of tell-alls. The mark of a movie’s goodness must be more than just the fact that it presents and provokes genuine emotion. The events we witness in Tarnation are definitely more emotionally valid than, say, a cute-kid-with-disease movie where your feelings get played like a violin. But does that by definition make a movie “good”—the fact that someone presents to us an unsparing examination his or her life? I think not. One can feel sorry about the hardships of Mr. Caouette’s early life and admire his clear-eyed look back while still believing that privacy does, and should, exist.

—Roxanne Bogucka