At this year’s Chicago Film Festival, I’ve noticed a prominent connection between intimate family tales in my viewing lineup. As a youngest daughter and little sister to two older brothers, I admit the domestic stories I gravitate towards are often ones with which I can identify. However, at this year’s festival, I found myself moved immensely by stories of sons. It reminded me of a quote that’s stuck with me for years: “Seeing someone with their parents is a tangible reminder that we’re all composites” (Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things). The question this statement arises is which pieces in the parental puzzle fit, which do not, and why. The films I outline in this particular dispatch investigate these ideas as they bear witness to sons and fathers (or father figures) as they collide in love, competition, pride, and petulance.
David Fortune made his feature-length debut with “Color Book,” a slow-moving, intimate tale of a father and son in Atlanta, Georgia. The distinguishing feature of this film is patience, not solely on account of its pace, but in the very pathos of its story.
Lucky (Will Catlett, reprising a similar father figure role of the same name post-“A Thousand and One”) has recently lost his wife in a car accident. Now a single father, he has to balance the hours in the day between caring for his young son, Mason (Jeremiah Daniels), who has Down Syndrome, and coping with the sudden loss. The scales of this workload are not equal, and Lucky prioritizes Mason above all else, using the love of fatherhood to mask his grieving even as pain and frustrations seep through the surface. In an attempt to bring some light into their days, Lucky wants to take Mason to his first baseball game. This journey, via shoddy cars, public transit, and foot traffic, is depicted by “Color Book” with stunning tenderness and care.
I was blown away by how present “Color Book” felt. It is concerned with crafting a narrative composed of little moments rather than a big picture or overarching story. This welcomed tedium pushes the door open for full absorption of its characters, as does the gorgeous black and white portraiture and detailed inserts that make up its visual landscape. Catlett’s performance is gentle and evocative, as is the tangible chemistry between him and Daniels. With diegetic sound prevailing (there’s simply one perfectly chosen piece of soundtrack) and the film’s low, subtle score, Fortune renders the viewer not even a fly on the wall, but a guardian angel nestled up to the family. This closeness is “Color Book’s” greatest strength, delivering emotional magnitude within habitual close quarters.
Another feature-length debut, Jason Park’s “Transplant” was described by the festival as a meet cute between “Whiplash” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” The film lands the former’s nose-to-the-grindstone protege, but graciously lacks the melodrama of the latter. Jonah (Eric Nam) is a surgical resident. Displeased with the courteous pedagogy of his attending surgeon, he seeks to shadow Dr. Harmon (an anxiety-inducing Bill Camp) instead, the hospital’s superstar, but notoriously cutthroat, cardiac transplant specialist. Jonah anticipates that he’ll thrive under more intense tutelage, but as Dr. Harmon’s oppressive expectations, requests, and potential secrets come further to light, the methods of his ambitions are put to the test.
Jonah is focused, but tender. He prioritizes his goals as a surgeon without discarding the immense love he has for his mother (Michelle Lee). Park’s character study of Jonah is crafted extremely well, leaving enough within the film’s subtext to prompt post-credits reflection. The same cannot be said for the writing of Dr. Harmon’s character-building, which pushes the boundaries of cartoonishly evil (and includes an information dump in monologue form). Dr. Harmon meets Jonah’s empathy, earnest ambition, and care for family with a near complete excavation of compassion, making the tension between the duo a compelling centerpiece of the film.
However, Park’s crowning achievement in “Transplant” is his ability to craft a diverse, but balanced tone throughout the story. Jonah’s relationship with his mother balances out the ruthless clinical setting of the hospital with touching warmth. Meanwhile, the absence of his deceased father is felt in his almost indignant sense of competition, as well as the transplanted father figure that Dr. Harmon becomes. The idea of what it means (or perhaps what it takes) to pass the torch both personally and professionally is creatively explored, and in foiling these figures, the employment of classical versus jazz musical motif adds a kinetic edge that fully throws the film in motion.
Park’s “Transplant” is a compelling story that’s ultimately served on too clean of a platter. The script could have afforded to leave more things left unsaid, cushioning the impact of its intended punches by spelling out pivotal moments.
Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s “Alpha” has some notable inverses when compared to Park’s “Transplant.” The cold, clinical indoor setting of the hospital is traded for the merciless, snowy Swiss Alps, and the widowed mother becomes the widowered father.
Rein (Reinout Scholten van Aschat) lives most of his days out in the mountains, whether teaching snowboard lessons to kids or hitting the slopes with his friends. When his father, Gijs (the actor’s real father, Gijs Scholten van Aschat) comes to visit him, their fraught relationship, marked by resentments and suppressed grief, comes to a head in the unforgiving mountains that surround them.
Van Ewijk’s atmosphere is wonderfully constructed, as mother nature herself fills an equal spot in the film’s triangle of conflict. Extremely wide shots provide a sense of spacelessness among the snow, transforming natural beauty into an instigator for familial warfare. The eeriness of the mountains, looming and threatening authority over the small figures that traverse them, sets up tension from the film’s very introduction. Yet equally overwhelming, is Gijs’ presence, which to Rein, feels even more omnipresent and oppressive than the landscape.
The film’s script is on point in accomplishing the stress of a parent-child relationship. Moments that feel innocuous to his friends feel like gut punches to Reis. It perfectly ignites the familiar frustration of seeing a family member be charismatic to those around you whilst taking jabs that are invisible to those outside of the relationship. The real-life father-son chemistry of the Scholten van Aschats is on full display in “Alpha.” In one extremely tangible scene, they sit atop the mountain in silence, Rein stewing in anger and his father in petulance, giving greater magnitude to the feeling of dead air.
“Alpha” chooses its dialogue carefully, and moments of silence weigh just as much as little comments, ones that feel truncated in an intimate sense of domestic shorthand. Our role as voyeurs in their story is firmly established, as we are put in the position of bystander, picking up on little idiosyncrasies of their conflict while also feeling like the details are none of our business.
The film greatly affirms the feeling of suffocation that comes with familial fighting while also asking us to look at the bigger picture. “Alpha,” by means of both magnitude and subversion, emphasizes the weight of family and the fallibility of humanity in general. Spiking warmth in the cold, whether through the tenderness of possible redemption or the internal fires of their dissension, it captivates both as a family drama and gripping wilderness tale.