Elizabeth Chomko (2018)
To say that What They Had hasn’t had a wide release in London is an understatement. So I was surprised to see it showing at the Richmond Odeon, even more surprised that they’d put it in one of the bigger screens, much less surprised that I was the only member of the audience (and that the Odeon isn’t showing it a second week). Watching alone in the cinema gives you a strange sense of responsibility: in the words of a W S Merwin poem, ‘there is no one else who can forget it’ – a sentiment that resonates with the subject of first-time writer-director Elizabeth Chomko’s drama.
The film has no sex scenes but plenty of scenes of people in bed – having sleepless nights or being woken by their phone ringing. What They Had begins with a woman getting out of bed in near darkness. She opens a wardrobe and decisively takes out a jacket, which she puts over her nightdress. She then goes outside into a snowstorm and sets off walking. Chomko cuts back into the house the woman left, where an elderly man wakes suddenly to discover that she’s gone. The man is Norbert (Bert) Everhardt (Robert Forster) and the woman his wife Ruth (Blythe Danner), who has Alzheimer’s.
Although she’s found a few hours later and returns to their home in the Chicago suburbs, Ruth’s nocturnal outing triggers a family gathering that’s essential to Chomko’s purposes. The Everhardts’ son Nick (Michael Shannon), who lives near his parents, phones his sister Bridget (Bitty) (Hilary Swank) in California, to tell her things have reached crisis point. Bitty immediately returns to Chicago, along with her teenage daughter Emma (Taissa Farmiga). The stage is set for a battle of wills, principally between father and son. Bert, a narrow-minded ex-military man, is firmly in denial about the severity of Ruth’s dementia. He’s had several heart attacks but insists he can continue to care for her in the home they’ve shared throughout their long marriage. Nick, not in a settled relationship, angrily insists that Bert face facts and pushes for his mother to move into a local care home whose facilities will allow his father to live in sheltered housing, separately though nearby.
Elizabeth Chomko’s avoidance of the physically gruesome aspects of living with Alzheimer’s, the better to concentrate on character, is welcome in principle. In practice, it means she doesn’t have enough material for a feature-length piece (101 minutes) without broadening her focus into a less distinctive study of persisting tensions and frustrations within a family. In a promising early scene, when Bitty and Emma first arrive at the hospital where Ruth is being checked over after her night out, Bert tells Nick off for getting his sister to make the journey from California. This conveys a strong, credible sense of Nick being liable to be blamed for things because he’s always there to be blamed (and his presence taken for granted). The relationship is less interesting once it develops into a martinet-father-disappointed-with-feckless-son number, although the dialogue between them is often well-written – for example, in an exchange about the status of Nick’s job. He runs a bar; when Bert scorns him as a ‘bartender’, Nick corrects his father – ‘I’m a bar owner’. But Bert keeps asking, ‘Do you tend the bar?’ Nick eventually has to concede that he does.
The action takes place over the course of several days at Christmas time. Bitty’s unhesitating decision to fly to Chicago then is a clue that there’s not much to detain her in California. An unsatisfactory marriage is confirmed in due course. (Another early hint is Bitty out jogging on her own – as usual, a signal that a character is running-away-from-something.) It’s not clear why Emma comes along with her mother – other than for the reason that also explained the resentful son’s accompanying his rascally Nobel laureate father to Stockholm in The Wife: the two don’t get on and must be on screen together to demonstrate the fact. In Chicago, Bitty and Emma accompany Ruth, Bert and Nick to a Christmas church service, where Gerry (William Smillie), who was in high school with Bitty, reintroduces himself to her. A day or two later, with the rest of the family out of the house, she phones Gerry, who works as a handyman, to ask him to fit new locks on the doors, supposedly to make it harder for Ruth to wander off. As soon as Gerry arrives, Bitty flirts with him but he changes the locks first and things haven’t got far before the others arrive home (to find themselves unable to get in). This is enough, though, for the sternly moral Bert to smell a rat and book his daughter on a flight home the following day. Back in California, we discover why her marriage to Eddie (Josh Lucas) bores Bitty to tears. Compared with Eddie, Celia Johnson’s husband in Brief Encounter is a livewire.
Bitty’s marital situation and sense of grievance – she never had the chance to go to college, resents it that Emma is now wasting her time there – don’t matter enough, relative to her parents’ situation, to justify the attention they get. Hilary Swank has the most screen time of anyone but she stands out, in this mostly well-acted film, in a negative sense. During a visit by Bitty’s to her brother’s bar, she reacts to something he says by holding her hands in front of her face for what seems ages. The gesture is so oddly artificial you almost expect Nick to ask what on earth she’s doing. Swank does an even more extended weird routine when Gerry calls round. Bitty’s hyper-self-conscious uncertainty comes across like a bad parody of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall: forceful and unnuanced, Hilary Swank has no talent for zany dither. Elsewhere in the film, she’s competent but stubbornly unsurprising.
There’s good work from her co-stars, though. It’s a relief to see Michael Shannon, miscast in The Little Drummer Girl on television last autumn, resuming normal, excellent service. Robert Forster and Blythe Danner succeed, crucially, in convincing us that Bert and Ruth have had a happy life together. They do so without the film’s resorting to flashbacks (except in the form of mock home-movie bookends to the narrative) or much explicit dialogue. Although Ruth no longer reliably recognises Bert as her husband, she knows he’s ‘my boyfriend’. The strength of his feelings for her comes through most powerfully on the two occasions that Ruth goes missing (the second time only briefly), when Bert’s irascible authority is suddenly replaced by anguish. The past tense of the title makes clear that dementia has dispossessed the couple but also comes to suggest that what they had – the security of their mutual love, religious (Catholic) faith – are things their children haven’t had and won’t have, even though Nick and his partner eventually get back together.
Elizabeth Chomko executes the end of Ruth and Bert’s marriage very effectively. We see them in bed together at night. Ruth looks to be sound asleep. Bert gets up and calmly makes a phone call. A screen moment later, the blue light of an ambulance is flashing outside the house. Each of Nick and Bitty wakes to their bedside phone sounding. Cut to a funeral service. Chomko has made it seem that Ruth has died in her sleep then we see a coffin containing Bert. Like The Wife (again), an early health report on the husband signals his eventual fate – but this heart attack is, unlike the one in The Wife, handled with taste and imagination.
Other aspects of Chomko’s debut aren’t so great. The melancholy lighting (by Roberto Schaefer) is overdone – the visuals are dark-toned sometimes to the point of muddiness. A few details of the set-up don’t make sense: unless he’s meant to be significantly older than Robert Forster is or looks, it’s hard to see how Bert could have fought in the Korean War. And the resolutions of the story are too orderly and upbeat. The last scene Nick and Bert have together is in Nick’s bar; the last thing the father says to the son is also the first time that he praises him (for a Manhattan cocktail, the house speciality). Bitty, who has now left Eddie, tells Nick it’s her turn to look after Ruth, who moves to California without turning a hair. One other moment late on has a different effect. What They Had’s final bed scene, shortly after Bert’s funeral, has Ruth and Bitty sharing a double bed for the night. Ruth suddenly says that her husband’s death was ‘perfect timing’: any sooner, she’d have missed him too much; any later, she wouldn’t have known who he was. In conception, this may be another instance of Elizabeth Chomko’s tying things up too neatly but Blythe Danner transcends the conception. You believe in Ruth’s summing up as a brief flash of lucidity, receive it as an unexpected gift.
5 March 2019
