"People are inconsistent philosophical creatures": Patrick Wang on theatre, resourcefulness, and keeping it In the Family

Unfolding as a deeply immersive slow burn, in quiet rooms warmed and lived-in and painted by soft autumnal light, In the Family leads us to a place few films do: it is at once its own very specific world and a world that almost anyone can recognize. When the film is done you feel you’ve lived there for a time. The quotidian calm of the opening scenes is ruptured by an ordinary tragedy, a car accident that will throw everything into disarray without ever resorting to forced theatrics, and the film goes on to tell of a somewhat unusual conflict—a custody battle between a gay man and the family of his dead partner—in terms that are both realistic and generous in spirit. It takes its time to get where it’s going, and there are detours along the way, but every moment is filled with small discovery, a dialogue between memory and the present that builds steadily and complicatedly toward a powerful emotional release.

In the Family is the first feature from Patrick Wang, who has a degree in economics and a long history in the theatre and is originally from Texas. In the canon of great American debuts the film feels closest in spirit to Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me. (It’s worth noting that Lonergan also has a background in theatre.) Wang worked long and arduously to get everything right, so right that he wound up writing, producing, directing, starring in and even distributing his film himself: despite its scale, In the Family is very much an artisanal film. Wang made it in Martin, Tennessee, because it seemed like “a place where you could find anyone.” Though Joey, Wang’s character, isn’t just anyone; he’s a man of great integrity, and it’s rare that protagonist so fundamentally decent can be so captivating. As is Wang himself. We spoke about his career and In the Family as the film began trickling into Canadian cinemas a couple of weeks ago.

JB: How did you move from economics to the theatre?

Patrick Wang: For many years I was doing both. My fellow economists were always fascinated by theatre, while my fellow thespians were always asking me about economics. [Laughs] I don’t see them as all that different. In the sciences there’s a great need for creativity, while in the arts there’s a lot of room for analysis. They use different muscles in different proportions. Obviously, it’s very different work.

JB: Had you worked in theatre primarily as a director or actor?

PW: When I started my own company my background was mostly as an actor. So I had lots of questions. I did my first directing with the company. That’s where I learned. And what I learned in the theatre is what got me through this film. I learned to talk to collaborators. I didn’t have a very visual background and always thought that was my weakness, so dialogue with designers was something I worked to cultivate. Theatre is pretty low-key in terms of certain barriers, such as getting people to teach you how they do their work. That inviting atmosphere was everything to me.

JB: In the Family holds this nice tension between what might be regarded as theatrical and cinematic elements. So often filmmakers are taught to think of the theatrical as a bad thing.

PW: All my favourite filmmakers have been people of the theatre: Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Orson Welles. Where they land is pure cinema, but there’s a certain confidence, a set of priorities that includes performance and literature. They know what performance can do on its own without adding all these other elements to support it.

JB: Was it always your intention to write, direct, produce and act in In the Family?

PW: I started with the script and assumed that was the only thing I’d be doing. I thought I’d leave the rest to the professionals. I looked for producers and directors and other people to work on it. There’s nothing in this project that promises to do wonders for anyone’s career—you just have to love the project. I’m sure there are people out there who would have been perfect matches, but you start down this road and at some point wonder if this search is very good use of your time. You start to wonder what would happen if you tried this or that hat on. Can I do these tasks with the proper respect the roles demand? Will the project lose something because of it? Those are hard questions. The roles accumulated over time. First came writing, then producing, then directing, then acting. I was most resistant to the acting.

JB: The part seems tailor-made for you.

PW: When I wrote the part I did not see myself in it. And we didn’t rewrite him for me. I think that over time I simply moved more towards the character. You start to feel this need to defend a character or a story, a play or a film, because you worry that it can be so easily misunderstood. You want to be there to help it, to foster it.

JB: Working in theatre teaches you to take long breaths, and In the Family is a film composed of long breaths. It allows each scene the space it needs to breathe. The result is that it’s 169 minutes long, which is kind of audacious for an unknown filmmaker making his feature debut, with no stars. But the film’s duration is essential for it to do what it does emotionally, to tell its very particular story.

PW: The running time did make me worry for the film’s life. I kept thinking there’s got to be some way to cut it down. But every time I tried I became only more convinced that this was the length the film needed to be. Otherwise you risk losing its uniqueness. You wind up making things more obvious. The film as is doesn’t clearly signal where it’s going. It takes false turns. It feels more honest. Our lives tend to favour a certain tempo. We’re used to movies and TV that function at this accelerated rhythm. But I think the reason people can roll with In the Family is because it’s inviting. It doesn’t tell you things; it lets you find things. It gives you the space to put your own life up there. We don’t get many opportunities to really meditate on certain heavier moments in life. So perhaps it’s a kind of luxury to sit and deal with these things.

JB: Physical space seems just as integral to In the Family as temporal space. The house your character lives in, this house he’s helped construct, this house from which a huge part of his life has suddenly disappeared: that’s one space. The house that Cody’s sister inhabits is a very different space, one that says a lot about her. The most interesting contrast comes from the house that Joey’s client is having renovated. So space, domestic space, is hugely important, but again, when you’re working with a very limited budget it can’t be easy to define such spaces so precisely.

PW: A lot of our budget went to locations for exactly the reasons you’re addressing. Sometimes you just need the right space. Maybe you cut a day out of your production, but it’s worth the investment. The right space and right density of detail. There’s something about production design that, even when on location, can feel false. Sometimes it’s too neat; sometimes it’s too self-consciously cluttered. I was able to work with a very talented production designer, and we spent a lot of time on density of detail, on searching for that feeling of home, the way a home can change its character over the course of a day. Especially when it’s empty. I think people recognize that, the feeling of an empty home on a Saturday afternoon when the neighbour’s cutting the lawn.

JB: I want to ask you more about Joey. Your performance is very rigorous about not pushing the emotion. But I don’t think it’s correct to say that Joey’s emotionally reserved; he’s very unobtrusive. It’s a quality that becomes apparent early in the film, in the hospital most obviously. He never makes it explicit to the hospital staff that Cody is his partner, that he should be in the room with him.

PW: It’s not that Joey resigns himself. He keeps trying to get what he wants, but not in a way that’s abrasive. I appreciate the care you take with words when trying to describe him, because a lot of people call him passive. I don’t believe that to be correct. In terms of getting things done in his life he’s a very active person. But he’s a peaceful person, and that’s typically seen as anti-dramatic.

JB: He takes enormous risks.

PW: He places his trust in people. His risks hinge on the idea that people can change.

JB: Which I think brings us to politics. In the Family is densely political in so many ways, not the least being the sheer fact that its protagonist is at once Asian-American, gay, Southern, and working class. But nowhere in this film will you find anyone coming out and articulating a polemic. No one’s waving flags. I’m not even sure that anyone even uses the word “gay” once in the entire movie.

PW: You’re right. It’s never used. I noticed at some point in the writing that this language of identity wasn’t coming up. I thought that was interesting. You expect there will come a moment when a character will explain the conflict. But these people just don’t talk that way. I think you see more of what’s it’s like to be of a minority race in this film than a lot of films that place race firmly in the foreground. People are more than any one thing, and in Joey’s case you’re never sure what part of him people are responding to. People themselves might not know what they’re responding to. People are inconsistent philosophical creatures. For a film to neglect that aspect of human nature doesn’t feel as interesting to me. If we talk about this film as an exercise of sympathies, then there has to be some kind of distance for us to cover. We need to stretch a little to reach out to these people. We need to make that investment in faith.

Actual Miles

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is among the greatest, most audacious, most truly individual studio-backed movies that could probably only have been made in the 1970s, one that feels like myth from a distance but when you’re actually in it, behind the wheel of it, is really a string of loving detail with no apparent concessions to grand design. It’s about a deal made at some seldom-patronized country service station, a cross-country race for pink slips, with stops only for cheeseburgers, gas and small repairs. One car is a slick yellow GTO, the other a hulking old Chevy, a car that’s all performance, no glamour—it doesn’t even have a heater since a heater might slow it down—and Hellman’s backseat camera shakes with the Chevy’s surges in speed. The movie’s universe is soaked in restlessness, but not the romantic sort. The purity absorbs you without explaining a thing. 

The characters have no names. The Chevy has a Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and a Driver (James Taylor), a Beach Boy and a famous singer-songwriter, though neither talk much, much less sing—they can’t afford to waste the energy. Even Taylor’s leanness seems calibrated for speed. So these stoic, long-haired hustlers, who are they? Certainly not the counterculture emblems of Easy Rider (1969). Are they young men of their generation or of something much deeper in the American mindset, or maybe that of the late 19^th century European novel? The movie, scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer, opts to keep their mystery intact, while leaving much room for the actors’ low-key charisma to unfurl.

They’re joined by a girl (Laurie Bird, who was pretty mysterious even in real life), a tousled tomboy nymphet vagabond. Her entrance is spied entirely through the window and doorway of a diner; she transfers her body and belongings from one vehicle to another—the Chevy. Driver and Mechanic get in the car as she nests in the back. They drive off without so much as a word, as though her appearance in their car was not planned per se but a perfectly ordinary occurrence. She’s the first to speak. She just wants to make sure they’re not the Zodiac killer. 

Driver and Mechanic, the two-headed lone wolf, are most often seen from the front or behind, while the pilot of the GTO (Warren Oates) is most often seen from the side, the most appropriate point-of-view for a compulsive conversationalist. Few actors in history can be so endearing while being so baldly ingratiating, and Two-Lane Blacktop supplied us with one of Oates’ finest performances. Oates’ affectations are lovingly honed: the stiff collar and cashmere V-necks, the driving gloves with the knuckle-holes, the scarf or ascot or whatever that is round his neck, the tape collection perfectly cued-up so that he can play, say, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ just as a pretty girl slides into his passenger seat. He claims he’s scouting locations for a “down-home movie on fast cars,” which is doubtlessly total bullshit. He tells the girl he wants to take her away, says they can go to Miami or Montreal or Mexico—he’s a one-man Wild Bunch. (That Oates shares a scene with Harry Dean Stanton, the other greatest character actor of the 1970s, should constitute some special section of cinephile heaven, though the truth is that theirs isn’t one of the film’s best bits, with Stanton playing a hitchhiker who gets weepy when Oates won’t accept his unsolicited affections. “I got no time for sidetracks,” he explains apologetically.)

The racing opponents are also companions, helping each other out along the way, taunting each other playfully, exchanging hard-boiled eggs and hooch or drugs as peace offerings. Like the movie itself, which was shot in sequence in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, they’re in for the long haul—there is nothing else. So it’s no surprise that it all ends with the movie itself seemingly burning up on-screen. Everything is obliterated in the slipstream.

Pictures from a revolution/the sounds of Satan

By 1968 Jean-Luc Godard had abandoned the commercial film industry completely, despite international notoriety and success making films that already pushed fiercely against the boundaries of what a commercial film could be. His last such film was the magnificently apocalyptic Weekend (1967), which I wrote about last week. Sympathy for the Devil (1968), also known as One Plus One (Godard’s original and preferred title), is probably Godard’s most famous work from this radicalized, little-seen period, the reason being that the Rolling Stones appear in roughly half the film, though they are not there to provide excitement in any conventional sense.

Godard documented the Stones in the studio in long, uninterrupted, ominously slow tracking shots. They were working on an especially difficult to apprehend new song. Godard isn't dismayed by the ordinary tedium of studio labour; he lets it all play out. ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ which would become one of the most distinctive, sinister, irresistible tunes in the Stones catalogue, chronicles the eponymous narrator’s diabolical accomplishments across two millennia, wearing many guises: “I stole many a man’s soul and face,” Mick Jagger sings. Jagger came in with lyrics and chords but the band had yet to summon the right groove. When they find it, turns out it’s samba, with Keith Richards on bass, Bill Wyman shaking maracas, and later, in the film’s best documentary moment, the whole band, sans Jagger, huddled around a microphone singing the woo woos, along with a thin woman in huge hat and huge pants who I presume to be Anita Pallenberg. Decades of domestication makes it easy to forget that there was a time when some really believed the Stones were in league with Mephistopheles. (For more on this moment in Stonesology see Zachary Lazar’s excellent 2008 novel Sway.) But the cultivation of rock mythology was very far from Godard’s agenda, as is evident in cutaways to people spray-painting slogans like SOVIETCONG and FREUDEMOCRACY on London’s walls, cars, sidewalks and bridges, and in the film’s many elaborate staged sequences.

In the first such sequence a black man reclines in a wheelbarrow, under a bridge, surrounded by piles of wrecked cars—just one year after Weekend and it’s the end of civilization all over!—reading aloud from a book about musical appropriation and the roots of blues. Another man enters the frame to hand the reader a rifle; the camera then follows him back into the labyrinth of this Battersea scrapyard, where still more men, all of them pretend Black Panthers, read from other texts into recording devices, texts about race war and black unity. Soon a red Mini arrives with captive white girls wearing white shifts. One of their captors reads from an ode to white women, how he loves to smell their drawers, and so on. Later a camera crew follows a pretty young woman through a wood, posing questions about drugs, culture, politics, Vietnam, to which she answers only “yes” or “no.” Later still there’s a bookstore crammed with pulp and girly mags, where another man reads aloud and captive Maoists sits miserably in one corner.

So what’s it all about? The film’s too cryptic to be didactic, too detached and adrift to be agitprop. Something forming in the studio, something forming in the streets. Something about rising up, violence, overturning order, but always with posterity in mind. In every scene something’s being enacted, recited, and, above all, recorded. The revolution will not be televised but it will be spoken into machines for future reference. Somewhere in all this, between takes, Jagger sings the title verse of ‘No Expectations.’ Sound advice for prospective viewers of this film. 

(Con-)fusion is sex (by which I mean gender)

He grew up misunderstood, beat up every day at school, and quickly nurtured his flamboyant freak credentials (this is the glam era) in the realms of music, shock value, and cross-dressing. She left home at 14, went to Alphabet City, put herself through med school, created performance art that questioned gender roles and the body’s limits, eventually becoming a nurse. They first met when he was crashing at a friend’s dungeon in the East Village.

They fell in love, and were swept up by this thing love does to us sometimes: it makes one want to consume the other, to fuse, to become a mirror to the other. Genesis P-Orridge and Jacqueline Breyer took this to heart. They didn’t want to part, ever. They wore each other’s clothes, got the same haircut and, despite their notable physical differences (his bulldog torso versus her pixie figure, a 20-year age gap), they eventually began their most ambitious project, one involving arduous surgeries, including matching breast implants, to make themselves resemble each other as much as possible. Can you imagine the luck? To find someone who not only shares your taste in fashion and art but also is willing to join you on the long, uncharted route to surgical symbiosis? Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a portrait of this singular love story.

Losier’s approach is hermetically sealed, told very much from the inside, in certain ways willfully naïve, and something like the opposite of journalism. There’s no commentary, no talking heads, just P-Orridge’s narration over a montage of home movies, archival footage and fragments of musical performance. I think the approach works very well, prizing intimacy over critical assessment. Why not? There’s a great story there, a forced identification with what is for most an alien lifestyle choice, and Losier crafts a very specific, oddly charming aesthetic experience from her material to boot, blending voice and image into a twinkly memory stream. But I would suggest that the film’s one major flaw is its lack of balance between its two subjects, its overwhelming focus on P-Orridge (who seems to have a knack for making himself the focus in most situations). I can’t help but think the ideal Ballad would be one in which the individual narrative of one its titular characters shifts seamlessly into the other before blurring the two, division leading to fusion. Cinema can splice reality like no other medium, and Losier’s approach, bold and precise as it is, only lacks this one great conceptual push, a way of having her project perfectly align with that of her subjects.

Weekend: Godard's eternal flaming car wreck

Title cards flash across the screen in the opening minutes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967); they inform us that what we’re watching and listening to is both “a film adrift in the cosmos” and “a film found atop a scrap heap.” Very different settings in which to discover a masterpiece of radical post-classical cinema, but either suggests that this is an artifact from a lost time and place, cine-notes from the end of the world. The film’s key images and sounds support this: protracted lines of stalled traffic, the drivers relentlessly, futilely honking their horns, as though the sustaining of this cacophony will do anything to quell their sociopathic road rage; rural landscapes in which the flaming ruins of crack-ups litter the freeways, corpses hanging from shattered windows or scattered across the shoulders like abandoned refuse. A three-car pile-up is overseen by a woman screaming bloody fucking murder, crying out in soul-agony, not for a loved one trapped or maimed or impaled in the wreckage, but for her Hermès handbag. In this only slightly exaggerated version of our world rape and murder is just a shot away, but the loss of designer accessories prompts a level of suffering too painful to bear in silence.

Describing such scenes risks rendering Weekend a very broad anti-consumerist satire, but the film, Godard’s fifteenth feature from his insanely prolific first decade, which begins as something of a neo-noir (a couple conspires to collect a substantial inheritance while each secretly plots the other’s demise) before descending into car-centric social breakdown and casual cannibalism, is dense with nuance, allusion and calculated misdirection. This is an audaciously blunt, bitingly politicized work in so many ways (most notably in its depiction of widespread affectless avarice as a result of high capitalism), yet its overt didacticism, delivered though rampant branding, on-screen text, militant monologues, literary quotations, and absurdist scenes of violent conflict over the most incidental damage to private property, is counterbalanced by formal strategies and narrative twists that, while firmly grounded in the era’s dominant Leftist ideology, always assures us that there's nothing noble about either side of the film’s battle between its haut bourgeoisie and forest-dwelling, Sgt. Peppery anarchist revolutionaries. Godard doesn’t need us to identify with any individual or group in Weekend; his interest seems to lie in the formation of a vast canvas, à la Bruegel, of social turmoil, drawing our attention to horrors that would feel unnervingly true-to-life as the West became increasingly embroiled in Vietnam and France would erupt into strikes and protest the following spring.

Yet Weekend’s prescience expands beyond the special chaos of the 1960s. Its use of the car as the quintessential object of consumerist idolatry is only more resonant in our age of rising oil prices, status anxiety and gaping class divides. Its formalist strategies have inspired countless subsequent satires, even if precious few strike Godard’s uncanny balance of wit, intelligence, craft and provocation. Weekend makes a brilliant double feature with Crash (1996), David Cronenberg’s inspired adaptation of the novel by J.G. Ballard, whose entire body of work could be seen as aligning itself to Godard’s vision of civilization’s auto-destruction (even if in Ballard’s version the cars are fetishized instead of demonized). So what we’ve got here is an apocalypse movie that speaks both to its moment and to the ages, a durable, colorful, endlessly fascinating, surprisingly entertaining ode to catastrophic collapse from an artist who to this day has yet to be outdone in terms of bridging the commercial cinema with the avant-garde. Vive la fin du monde! Vive Weekend!