In the Family (2011) and The Grief of Others (2015): two films by Patrick Wang (Review)

It’s rare, to say the least, for a director to go from having no films released in the UK to having his entire back catalogue made available overnight. But this is what’s happened to Patrick Wang, whose four features to date were released by Bulldog Film Distribution at selected cinemas in February and are now available on VoD. We reviewed his two-part magnum opus A Bread Factory when it was on cinema release, and now we’re doubling back to look at his first two films, In the Family and The Grief of Others.

On paper, you might think In the Family is the closest thing to A Bread Factory, if only because of its epic length. You can say many things about a film-maker whose first feature is nearly 170 minutes long, but you can’t possibly accuse him of a lack of ambition. Yet In the Family feels like anything but a grandiose ego trip. It’s a low-key, often painfully intimate story about Joey, played by the director, whose partner Cody is killed in a car accident. This would be traumatic enough, but Joey has a son from a previous marriage, and in addition to his grief he is drawn into a lengthy legal battle to maintain custody.

In the Family is one of those American movies that gets a lot of praise for avoiding melodrama, and it’s easy to understand why: a Hollywood take on this story would involve a lot more Oscar-baiting and a lot less of the quiet domesticity that helps you understand what Joey stands to lose. While I wouldn’t have wanted the film to turn into Philadelphia, I did find myself wishing – as I often do when confronted with this kind of indie film – that the melodrama had been replaced with something. The discursive, playful quality that made A Bread Factory‘s four hours fly by is nowhere to be seen, and I did wonder whether Wang’s refusal to indulge in the crying and screaming audiences might expect from this story was realistic or merely tasteful. It’s an impressive calling card for Wang as a director – and as an actor, anchoring the whole film and playing beautifully off his screen son Sebastian Banes – and it should be noted that some people have named this as their favourite film of the whole quartet. But not me.

The Grief of Others also has a misleading relationship to the rest of Wang’s work; the title leads you to expect a reprise of In the Family‘s core theme, while the more manageable 103-minute run-time suggests a more commercial film. It sort of is, in that The Grief of Others is certainly accessible and has a few more recognisable faces in the cast. (One of them, Mike Faist, was little-known when he made this but has recently attracted attention for his stand-out performance in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story; anyone watching this film purely for his performance will not be disappointed) But it’s also the most experimental film Wang made prior to the semi-musical A Bread Factory Part Two.

Wang’s only adaptation to date, The Grief of Others is based on Leah Hager Cohen’s novel of the same name. It features another excellent child performance from Jeremy Shindler as the put-upon, bullied Biscuit, but this time his performance is bolstered by a cloud of internal (or are they?) voices that push their way onto the soundtrack whenever he gets lost in his thoughts. Wang’s naturalism and unobtrusive long takes can make it hard to appreciate what a gifted visual director he is, but The Grief of Others has some remarkable flourishes, with initially enigmatic red-tinted scenes finding an ingenious echo in one character’s job as a painter and decorator. It all builds towards a truly unique final shot that might, perhaps, allegorise the characters finding a way to marry their domestic and public lives – a genuinely new way to show people achieving a hard-won state of harmony.

Watching a director’s entire output is guaranteed to put you in an auteurist frame of mind. What struck me as I closed off my mini-season of Patrick Wang films is how your sense of a director’s personality can change depending on when you first encounter them. If I’d had the chance to see Wang’s first two films before A Bread Factory was made, I’d have assumed In the Family was a one-off experiment and his future lay in more succinct films like The Grief of Others. Instead, A Bread Factory saw him synthesising the two approaches: the personal quality and grand scale of In the Family mixed with The Grief of Others‘s freewheeling boldness and shrewd casting of comedians and comic actors (Tina Fey regular Rachel Dratch gets a notable cameo in the earlier film, and Janeane Garofalo pops up in A Bread Factory). Who can predict what he’ll do next?

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – THE GRIEF OF OTHERS & IN THE FAMILY