Tarnation

Released 2003
Stars Jonathan Caouette, Renee LeBlanc, Aldolph and Rosemary Davis, and David Sanin Paz
Directed by Jonathan Caouette

Renee LeBlanc was a beautiful little girl; she was a professional model before she was 12. Then Renee was injured in a fall from the family garage and descended into depression. Her parents agreed to shock therapy; in two years she had more than 200 treatments, which her son blames for her mental illness, and for the pain that coiled through his family.

"Tarnation" is the record of that pain, and a journal about the way her son, Jonathan Caouette, dealt with it -- first as a kid, now as the director of this film, made in his early 30s. It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful. It has been constructed from the materials of a lifetime: Old home movies, answering machine tapes, letters and telegrams, photographs, clippings, new video footage, recent interviews and printed titles that summarize and explain Jonathan's life. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land," and Caouette does the same thing.

Summary by Roger Ebert

You could look at this movie as an example of the American nightmare. Normally, this is my kind of thing, but I didn't find it as compelling as I expected because it focuses so much on Jonathon. I was interested in what happened to Renee and how Jonathon dealt with it, but this movie only gave me the child's (Jonathon's) perspective. Although he's in his 30's now, Jonathon is still a narcissistic, self-absorbed adolescent, and it just made me lose interest. We only get a filtered view of their lives because everything is from his perspective. How much can you really know about your parents' lives from before you were born? So we get a lot of insight into Jonathon's childhood, and it's pretty ugly. The one thing I did find fascinating was his video monologue he made at 11. It felt like he was improvising, but it could have been from a play or movie for all I know. Regardless, it was pretty damned impressive. Other than that, the whole thing just made me feel kind of ill. These were people I had no interest in being around. I'm sorry, but I can't empathize with every tragedy in the world without going crazy. --Bill Alward, May 18, 2006