IN THE FAMILY written and directed by Patrick Wang, with Wang, Sebastian Brodziak, Kelly McAndrew and Trevor St. John. A Vagrant Films release. 169 minutes. Opens Friday (June 1). For venues and times, see Movies.
Plenty of people write, direct and star in their own movies these days. Not everyone makes an American masterpiece his first time out, though, which is what makes Patrick Wang stand apart.
Wang’s debut feature, In The Family, is a virtually unprecedented piece of American cinema. It runs nearly three hours and tells a wrenching human story – about a gay man’s attempt to secure custody of his dead lover’s son in a small Tennessee town – without slipping into showy hysterics or Oscar-ready speechifying. Wang wasn’t interested in making that kind of movie.
“I was getting to a place where I felt like an alien in terms of what passes for depth and thought in cinema,” he says over the phone from his home in New York City. “It’s been such a relief, after putting this film out there, to find [I’m] not alone, that people recognize these things.
“I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me – people who maybe even don’t go to the movies a lot – and the first thing out of their mouths is ‘That’s my life!’ These things that movies cut out – you know, breakfast, getting ready for school in the morning – these things are where a lot of our life takes place. We don’t spend most of our time yelling at each other.”
This isn’t to say that In The Family is dull, mind you.
“There’s always something happening,” Wang says. “It’s a slow film, but it’s not one of those slow films where nothing happens. It’s a slow film where everything happens.”
In The Family can’t be described as an issue picture. No one even utters the words “gay” or “homosexual” in the movie. The Southern setting leaves a lot of things unspoken, including the protagonist’s isolation from his lover after a car accident. Wang captures it all in a naturalistic mise-en-scène that reminded me of Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes.
“Those were actually two reference points for my design team,” he admits. “Scenes From A Marriage and A Woman Under The Influence. I love the production design of those films. They look almost accidental, but they are so beautifully thought out. There’s something very honest about them.”
And as Bergman and Cassavetes did before him, Wang built his movie from the ground up, creating an entire world for the characters in his head.
“I thought about their lives before I really thought about scenes or structure or even before knowing where the story was going,” he says. “If you think about people’s lives, you think about what’s significant. And the things I find significant in my life are not the moments when people are yelling at each other. They’re the moments when someone says something that is very poignant, but oftentimes not loud.”
That attitude is reflected in Wang’s performance as the endlessly considerate Joey, who has every right to be furious about his marginalization but somehow never explodes.
“I definitely am not like that I do get a lot angrier than Joey,” Wang laughs. “But I admire people who have that integrity, who know how to peacefully move through a situation – and it’s reflected in how they deal with things like loss.”
Interview Clips
Patrick Wang on casting In The Family:
Wang on setting his movie in the South:
Wang on the trouble with most dramas:
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