Every year at SXSW, my list of must-see movies before the fest begins is usually pretty empty. I rely a great deal upon the SXSW Directory, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the vast expanse that is the Film portion of the conference. Thanks to that book and usually a good deal of word of mouth form those I trust, I am led to the particular undiscovered films that end up filling in most of my blanks on the dance card.
In a Dream director Jeremiah Zagar
Some of them are good enough, better than you or I could make, full of craft, but ultimately forgettable. There are others that I find detestable and unwatchable, which inevitably one friend of mine or another will love so much they refuse to relent blogging it to death or recommending it to people who will later hate them with the fire of a thousand suns for recommending they waste a couple hours of their life.
Then there are the few that transcend the ordinary cinematic experience, the ones you leave shaken loose from the mundane and little closer to heaven for a few hours afterward. To encapsulate these movies in a synopsis proves a difficult task indeed.
Last night I saw one of those films, one that (schedule permitting) I plan to see again before the end of the week, a rarity for a week when it's nearly impossible to see everything.
Jeremiah Zagar's In a Dream could have been a very different film, and I'm very glad this is what it turned out to be.
The director's father, Isaiah Zagar, spends sometimes 14-16 hours a day working on the mosaic murals for which he has become legendary in Philadelphia, the city his family has called home for the last three decades or so. To just pick up a camera and point it at the prolific genius of his father's work would have been "doing the job", but
Jeremiah has instead set himself on making the masterpiece possible with the tools and resources he had available.
We have seen the "genius in my family everyone arbitrarily calls crazy" documentary.
We have seen the "deep, wounding family-rending trauma" documentary.
We have seen the "exposing vulnerabilities no one else is brave enough to" documentary.
We have seen them all in various iterations, these themes. Wondrously, Jeremiah has followed the majestic work of his father and broken these media into shards and chunks, carefully plastering them together in a provocative and fascinating mosaic of a his father's life.
Isaiah's work comes out unfiltered in his murals, spilling from his heart through the work of his hands all across these monuments he's built. The pictures and images are not always pleasant or easy to look at, but in doing so, I find myself relaxing my aversion to expressing my own vulnerability.
Jeremiah's film charts his family history beginning with his father's relationship with his mother Julia, proceeding to pick up characters as we go and constantly touching back on the past and completing the detail work around the whole picture. The symbiotic joys and pressures of maintaining the family Isaiah and Julia built frame the film, always centered around the destructive elements of their life together repairing and reconstructing it through all the crises they face. The film picks up in real-time at a decisive moment when that capacity to rebuild comes into question.
Other writers would summarize the vast majority of the "plot points" of the film, but I respect it too much to do that. In a Dream will have you question whether everyone's a little "crazy" in varying degress, rather than simply "crazy" or "sane." The movie will also help you reassess (as my wife and I did) how "difficult" your life really is at the end of the day. I came away feeling that, at least in this country, we've all got it pretty good.
Anyone and everyone who is in Austin this week should see this film if they are able to get in. It screens again Tuesday at 1:30pm and Thursday at 4pm, both days at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar.
An aside: Saturday morning, Isaiah and his team of muralists installed a series of murals on the fence outside Austin landmark Stubbs'. According to what I was told last night, someone has already stolen a portion of it. I took pictures that morning of the almost-finished product, pre-theft, in this post. A damn shame.