'Tarnation' wins praise of critics, who describe maker as 'visionary'

The movie is unlike any other, and critics still are trying to figure it out.
By CHRISTOPHER KELLY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
TORONTO -- Houston-born filmmaker Jonathan Caouette didn't set out to alter the face of an art form with his brave, harrowing, breathtakingly weird new film, "Tarnation."
He didn't consider the fact that he was making a movie unlike any that's been made before. He never expected that once people started seeing said movie -- among them, filmmakers Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell and critic Roger Ebert -- they would anoint Caouette as a visionary.
"It was just a thing that I was doing at night," Caouette said last month, fidgeting and chain-smoking his way through an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I had specific ideas and possibilities for how this footage could be put into something. But the movie was essentially this living piece of art that kept having different beginnings and endings."
What it is
The footage Caouette is talking about is 20 years' worth of his home movies and family photographs, all of which he loaded into his Apple computer, then transformed into "Tarnation." The resulting movie is almost impossible to catalog: On one level, it's an avant-garde collage, a crazy swirl of multiplying and fractured images and memories. On another level, it's a gorgeous long-form music video -- a gloomy, mod-pop mix tape with visual accompaniment. And on its most basic level, it's a fearless memoir that tells the heartbreaking story of Caouette's schizophrenic mother, Renee, a former model, who was given electroshock therapy as a teen-ager and then spent a lifetime drifting into and out of mental institutions.
If all of this sounds precious or maddeningly self-indulgent, it isn't -- not even for a moment. "Tarnation" -- which cost a sum total of $218.32 for the iMovie computer program with which the footage was edited -- comes together in ways that Caouette could never have expected. In ways no one could have expected.
Critics are stumped
Since its first screenings at the Sundance Film Festival in January, critics have been trying to put their finger on this kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting, one-of-a-kind movie. They'll likely still be trying to figure it out a decade from now.
"Tarnation" is certainly visionary; it's the first true masterpiece of the MTV generation. But it's also something bigger than all that. In the way it raises the stakes of personal filmmaking, in the way that it rests on a pinpoint between the narrative and the avant-garde traditions, and especially in the way it acts as a call to arms for anyone with a home-video camera to put their own stories on the screen -- well, "Tarnation" just might turn out to be the most influential movie of our times.
"Jonathan is a member of that first generation, where [someone] was theoretically able to film his entire life, because of the consumer video cameras that were first available in the early 1980s," said Mitchell, the creator of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and one of "Tarnation's" executive producers.
Taste in music
That generation, of course, is the same generation that grew up with MTV -- and one of the first things everyone notices about "Tarnation" is Caouette's impeccable taste in music, which he uses to convey the melancholia and shell shock of his childhood years. (None of the titles or artists is identified in the credits, but some of the more indelible pieces on the soundtrack include songs by Lisa Germano, Low and Nick Cave; and a gorgeous cover of "Frank Mills," from the musical "Hair," which Jonathan lip-syncs cannily.)
Driving force
But if a music-video aesthetic defines much of "Tarnation," Caouette's lifelong impulse to record himself is what drives the film forward. The movie begins in the present day, with images of him living with his boyfriend in New York City. But then, Caouette flashes back, to tell his mother's story and his own. We see bits and pieces of old home movies: Jonathan, for instance, as a little boy in drag, pretending to be a Tennessee Williams-style damsel in distress. We see Jonathan's own stabs at amateur filmmaking: ersatz horror movies he made when he was a teen-ager, with his grandmother as his lead actress. As an adult, Caouette is still filming himself, when he learns that his mother has suffered a potentially fatal lithium overdose.
These bits and pieces of film, photography and even answering-machine tape come at us in a furious, assaultive, sometimes unbearable manner. The screen splits into two and three; words dance across the screen; the images multiply and divide and then melt away. The movie is nothing if not an approximation of what it might feel like to experience the world from a schizophrenic's perspective.
But taken as a whole, "Tarnation" isn't jarring or disjointed. Instead, it feels like the culmination of the most significant cultural developments of the past two decades. It's a product of the dissociative, rapid-fire music-video aesthetic that is now ubiquitous in movies and on television.
Influential documentaries
But it also connects to a number of very influential documentaries (most notably, "Capturing the Friedmans," about a Long Island family that obsessively filmed itself, even after the patriarch was arrested on child-molestation charges); to the reality-television craze; to the "Oprah Winfrey"/"Dr. Phil" confess-your-sins-and-be-absolved-on-daytime-TV phenomenon; and to the past decade or so worth of spill-your-guts literary memoirs.
And what's so dazzling about the film is that it synthesizes all of these disparate influences and elements effortlessly and gorgeously. More than just one man's very personal story, "Tarnation" turns out to be an 88-minute meditation on what it means to live in these sped-up, hyper-caffeinated, overanalytical, self-obsessed times.