TEN STORIES TALL (David Garrett, USA)

It was perhaps an unconscious choice, but several of the films I caught at this year’s Palm Beach International Film Festival dealt with the sense of fragility and vulnerability that is at the core of human experience. In these films, characters face the realities of mortality and unfulfilled dreams with the kind of courage and grace that made a deep impression on audiences. If films teach life lessons, and I wholeheartedly think that they do, then these films have important things to teach all of us.

In the award-winning American indie feature DON’T LET ME DROWN, two New York families deal with death and destruction in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. One family lost someone in the World Trade Center Towers and the other has a father who works in the ruins of Ground Zero. Director Cruz Angeles brings an authentic Brooklyn sensibility to this contemporary Romeo-and-Juliet story, with its two teenage lovers offering a beacon of hope that love can heal even the deepest wounds.

In the charming British love story FORGET ME NOT, a young barmaid has an all-night adventure with a brooding musician who has tried to kill himself with a full arsenal of pills. The young woman is facing her own dilemmas, trying to find a place in the world and also tend to her grandmother, who is slowly losing control in the grips of Alzheimer’s disease. In the final reel, we discover that the musician is not just moody, but has an untreatable condition that will eventually bring on his demise, and that suicide seemed like an option…..until love unexpectedly comes into his life. Using contemporary London as its atmospheric backdrop, the film takes the solid position that life’s indignities can be cruel and unfair, but optimism cannot die if love is nurtured.

Alzheimer’s disease also plays a central role in the affecting drama LOVELY, STILL. Veteran actors Ellen Burstyn and Martin Landau play two seniors who find love and tenderness in their later years. In the film, which veers between comedy and high drama, Landau plays an isolated elder who does not have much to live for, until the engaging Ellen Burstyn comes onto the scene. However, there is an underlying tension in their relationship, a kind of unspecified melancholy that threatens to dampen the love affair. What we discover, again in the final reel, is that instead of just meeting one another, the two are in fact a long term married couple, but Landau has been losing his grip on reality because of the condition. The revelation that it is Landau who is “being lost to us” because of his fogginess and failing memory, makes for a highly dramatic climax.

The fragility of life and the enduring power of love is also at the core of MARATHON, which explores the true-life relationship between William Meredith, a former poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and his much younger lover Richard Harteis (who produced the film). As the older man slips into a coma from which he will not return, it is up to the younger man to keep the memory of their love constant and keep Meredith’s literary legacy alive.

In the ensemble drama TEN STORIES TALL, written and directed by former actor David Garrett, a troupe of New York theater actors bring a rare intimacy and a true New York feel to the story set amongst two families in contemporary Manhattan. The story begins at a funeral, where we, and the members of both clans, discover that the woman who has just died, the mother of one of the families, had been the long-time lover of the mother of the other family. Veteran theater actress Tovah Feldshuh brings an ornery intensity as the grieving woman who has a tempestuous relationship with her two daughters and her former husband. In other family clan, a brother and sister (winningly played by Josh Hamilton and Ally Sheedy) must not only confront the fact that their mother was a lesbian who concealed her true feelings, but also must face the brother’s inevitable decline from some unnamed condition that will greatly shorten his lifespan. As these characters rage, cajole and fight against the dying of the light, the director brings about a satisfying resolution for all the various spokes in the wheel in this relationship roundelay of a film.

In the Sundance Film Festival award winner WINTER’S BONE, a teenager must quickly grow up as she becomes the sole provider of her family after her mother suddenly passes away. Ingenue Jennifer Lawrence gives a striking performance as the teenage girl who tried to track down her itinerant father and save the family home in the bleak wilderness and poverty of the Ozark Mountains. For this family, failure or retreat into the past is no longer an option…..so as in all the other films, the uncertain future is the only road ahead and the present the only thing one can count on.  Life’s lessons available for discriminating audiences who are willing to take the journey……..

 For more information on these and other films at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, visit: www.pbifilmfest.com Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Dailies Editor