SEAN

I've watched this movie twice now, in as many days.  The first time, and even the second time, its affect wasn't immediately felt--there's nothing really in the strict narrative of the movie that is, in itself, noteworthy.  The story is interesting and the general conceit of tracking down individuals in a family 30 years after and making two films about them 30 years apart is neat in a "7 Up's" kind of way.

There was something else that was haunting me.  Something less tangible and in the end I think something that even the filmmaker didn't quite have a handle on himself.  He said he had discovered similarities between his own story and the life-story of his subject, Sean.  And so he wove into the film footage of his own family and elements of his own story - the generations of his life; his sons, his wife, his parents.  In doing so I think, for me, he tapped into something universal in the human experience.  The line from the Steve Winwood song - "how the endless road unwinds you."  And maybe Steve was talking about touring but I always took it as a metaphor for life.  And maybe with regard to this movie, and life itself, I mean it in a slightly less sinister way.

Life on display in this movie is unrelenting.  It goes on and on and because the director is using footage from his own life we see the effects of it close up.  People stay the same as they age.  The look older and fatter (in some cases) but they are who they are, only more so.  But at the same time the march of the years softens them, like a stone under a waterfall.  They become less angry maybe.  Life becomes less urgent.  Sean's hippie Dad is still a hippie but the weight of old age threatens his joy.  Sean goes from 4 year old baby, to grown man (but still a son) to married man to father himself.  We see his grandparents go from earnest communists disrupting a congressional hearing to smiling, laughing, whimsical romantics.  The directors relationship with his wife is shown first in a interview between the two of them where the romance and happiness is palpable but they age.  They don't split up, they don't grow apart, they just grow into themselves as individuals, in on themselves like separate in-grown toenails, even as their bond between them is just as intense a fact as it was in the beginning in their early romance.  She goes off to live in Paris, her home country, for three years without him.  It's not the end for them.  It's not all tears and tearing of garments.  Their life is between them.  Their history together is an unbreakable bond that the marriage certificate can barely sniff at.  When she comes back to America where else is she going to go?

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say even still.  I'm trying to grasp at it.  The urgency of life drops away even as life becomes more serious as you age toward the inevitable end.