"When we started this, all Sam wanted was to get his mom back. Did he ever get her back? I don't know. We may try to change things, but we end up in the same place. Replaying our scenes over and over, generation to generation. Sometimes maybe we can catch a glimpse of the cycle we're in and see for a moment how everyone is playing out their own version of a story that came before."
It's a hell of a thing for a mother to leave her teenage kids and disappear without explanation, and to see them try to cope with it had my heart in my throat, and that was just the beginning of an emotional churn in this brilliant film from Reed Harkness. The reactions to the abandonment across the family are varied, from her own mother judging her severely, to the bulk of the family simply not acknowledging what happened and refraining from talking about it, to an extraordinary amount of non-judgment from her boys, Sam especially. His gentle approach as a teenager is inspiring, and when questioned about it, he says:
"Well, I don't think any good can come from me believing she did the wrong thing. Whereas, I think there's a lot to gain from me trusting her still."
However, it's when the film jumps forward to ten years later, and we see the lasting damage she's done to Sam, that the film really takes on soul-shaking dimensions. We hear him describe the effects of not being valued by his own mother, with the loss of self-worth and the closing of emotional channels to people in his life, now saying:
"It's just a scary concept to think like, to just completely open up to a person that like, did that to me, you know? And really damaged the way I value myself."
The film then does an extraordinary thing, which is to ask his mother about her own childhood. Jois is of mixed heritage, born to a Japanese mother and Caucasian father in rural Japan, and then adopted at 18 months by an American family in the Pacific Northwest, given up because her racial identity would not have been accepted by the mother's community. She tells of always growing up at odds with her adoptive mother, and more troubling, that she would regularly get threatened her with being "sent back" to Japan. Without being heavy-handed about it, the film lets us connect the dots from Jois's own emotional damage to what she did to her sons, and it's devastating.
Meanwhile, I felt a lot of Sam's emotional struggle, the judgment towards his mother, yet still wanting a relationship, and also wanting to break the cycle in positive, healthy ways. He was even more inspiring to me speaking as an adult, trying to navigate all this, and then there's his paternal grandmother Doris, who is incredibly empathetic, and a truly enlightened soul - certainly more so than I, who couldn't help but notice the bitter irony of Jois complaining about adult Sam not contacting her even over a couple of holiday seasons.
It's an emotional story, but not one told in a melodramatic way. There are also some very artistic visuals here, evident even in the earliest home movies, as well as a great soundtrack. Definitely one to seek out.
