Film Review - Tarnation dir. Jonathan Caouette

Since seeing Jonathan Caouette’s mega-low budget documentary Tarnation, I have been asked for this review several times. I tried to kid my self that my failure to deliver it was down to laziness on my part, when at the back of my mind I knew it down to lack of ability. When I review films, I try to be funny, I try to be witty, and I try to think up a really dynamite line – something nice and quotable. After seeing Tarnation, it just wouldn’t come. I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t think of a summation which could grace the DVD cover. This is the only review I can truthfully give.

Tarnation is not a documentary, it’s not even a film. Made on Apple’s iMovies programme, it cost under $300 to make. The director compiled it using old video footage, the tragic attempt of a young boy to make sense of his life by committing it to video and watching it back, trying to convince himself, often successfully, that it was a work of fiction that stopped affecting him after the TV was turned off. At one point, a 14 year old Jonathan, who was serially abused by his grandparents and a parade of junkies that his mother brought to their home, performs an improvised monologue as a southern belle being beaten by her husband. He’s actually very good, which is even more disturbing than the pantomime unfolding before us. Caouette is depicting himself as a bit player in his sick mother’s life. She was a photographic model at the height of flower power, until she was paralysed in a fall. Her parents took the advice of a doctor who said that her ‘paralysis’ was psychosomatic and that she may benefit from a course of shock therapy. After ten years of this treatment, Renee LaBlanc was brain damaged and suffering from schizophrenia. This is the story of her and Jonathan’s life, as if it were understood and complied by a stranger.

Caouette has been portrayed as the unreliable narrator, but the film actually comes to us with a feeling of unwanted honesty. The onslaught of captions, still pictures, music and the rudimentary image manipulation which iMovies offers is like a waking nightmare at times, but it makes statements rather than begging for an emotional response. There is no Dawson’s Creek style musical manipulation, and the director has depicted himself as sympathetic, suffering, annoying, self-obsessed, selfless and selfish all at the same time. Other reviews of Tarnation have been concerned with whether this is a good film. I question these peoples understanding of what this ‘documentary’ was supposed to achieve. At the screening I saw, Jonathan Caouette was present, and answering questions about the film, and still I have no idea why this film was made, or who it was made for. The closest metaphor I can apply is that of a stomach bug. It seems that everything that happened in Jonathan’s life has been regurgitated onto film, and that the director can no more control the results than he can form a perfect turkey dinner from a pool of vomit.

I have concluded that 25 years of Hollywood film making has convinced me that film needs to be entertaining, or diverting, or that it at least has to have a point. Tarnation satisfies none of these conditions, yet I urge you to see it. Forget what you have previously expected from celluloid, it doesn’t apply here.