If, as Tolstoy said, happy families are all alike, it may be because they are opaque to the rest of us, for us friction and rifts are as family experiences as love a part of. Jesse, the only child at the center of Ricky Dumbledore’s cathedral , accepts all the details of his unfortunate family – not just when his parents divorced , not only his father’s ongoing financial and other struggles, but also awkward silences and intergenerational baggage , the celebrations through the ceremony tend to be graceful. The writer-director-editor’s micro-budget sophomore film, now streaming on Mubi, juxtaposes remembered interactions and still-life shots with a deliberate, elliptical precision, with minor notes built on a single chord , echoing the pain and unexpressed emotions of lost time.
In the eyes of the filmmaker’s alter ego, an in-production artist named Jesse Damrosch was born in 800, the function is in 20 unfolded in the last years of the century. The official composition of DP Barton Cortright, who also shot D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance, full of Undercurrents of melancholy, as if the indelible distant voice of Terence Davis, the still life has been washed and washed in the Long Island sun.
Cathedral
Bottom line
Heartbreaking punch.
Cast: Brian Darcy James, Monica Barbaro, Mark Zeisler, Geraldine Singer Director and screenwriter: Ricky Dambros
1 hour minute
The show’s fragmented family tree is an event that happened before Jesse was born: his father’s brother died of AIDS, which was denied by the family in an almost delusional, silent rejection A symbol of many things that happened in the years that followed.
Jesse at age 3 (Hudson McGuire), age 9 (Henry Glendon Walter V), 10 on screen (Robert Levey II) and 17 (William Bednar-Carter) – Sometimes looking directly into Cortright’s camera, eyes wide open, curious, sometimes taking class photos in front of the invisible photopher, sometimes interacting with his parents and other relatives. D’Ambrose further shapes the play with voiceover, with Madeleine James providing background details and descriptions of off-screen events with compassionate authority.
The story benefits from that sense of omniscience. At first it was fueled by a flippant sense of possibility and beginnings: Richard Damrosh (a heartbreaking Brian Darcy James) and Lydia O’Kin (Moore Nika Barbaro, perfectly portrayed in an underdeveloped, more symbolic role) and the birth of their son. They bought an apartment in the fictional New York town of Hailett, and he started a printing business. A friend (Steven Arront) provides important financial help, while Richard’s father (Gorman John Ruggiero) is mostly down. As for his rock-solid, caring mother (Melinda Tanner), he can never recover from her death.
Even at the wedding, Richard and his in-laws Nick (Mark Zeissler, excellent) and Flora (the wonderful and especially memorable Geraldine singer) There are also tensions between them. Hatred boiled over and exploded into conflict. Meanwhile, the relatively fixed Nick and Flora all but cut ties with her sister Billie (Cynthia Mays, poignant in her brief screen time), apparently to care for their mother Josephine . She is played by a quiet influence Candy Dato who turns out to be a dependency nightmare. Homeless and children’s pity, Josephine endures a brief stay with her brutal son (Roy Abramson) and his cold-hearted wife (Rosanne Rubino), Shosta Cowichan’s thunderous passages underscore their self-importance.
There are other horrors: First, the clown and ventriloquist show up for Jesse at the house party. Some of these parties were held in the ballroom, where Ray Romano was somewhere in Queens
. Top-down shots of D’Ambrose’s white tablecloths, coffee mugs, and dessert plates, combined with narration and subtle sound compositions, present a poetic, unforgettable sense of pain.
The film’s static, seemingly unchanging imagery contains a world of memories, moments that persist with a strange sense of urgency whether we understand their emotional underpinnings or not— Usually because we don’t understand. A great deal of domestic affairs plays out in the blank rooms of the researched, counter-productive design. Production designer Grace Sloan has infused other interiors with the comfortable wear and tear of a long-lived home in an unassuming suburban town.
D’Ambrose deftly uses advertising—Kodak film, coins commemorating the centenary of the Statue of Liberty—and news clips of the times—to build on the sense of time and place Above – Defining Disasters and Other Signs of the Times: Desert Storm; TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island; Gary Condit–Chandra The Levy scandal; the murder of Daniel Pearl; Michael Savage’s sensational political commentary about presidential candidate John Kerry; grief-stricken Nancy Reagan at her husband’s funeral; Hurricane Katrina. D’Ambrose suggested that myth-making was built upon these larger cultural events; by contrast, the Damrosches and Orkins, like most other American families, had to improvise on their own.
At birthday parties, confirmations, and graduations, there are occasional prickly and often empty chats. Ostensibly, Jesse is the protagonist and center of these gatherings, but in reality the heft of the family drama—and the narrator’s succinct insistence on “not trying to resolve differences”—pushes him into a corner, with whom he is slapped with at school. Teach to “move a file down the hall” as it’s less of a hassle for adults.
Cathedral The awakening of an artist, not only in the paintings and films he started making as a teenager, but also in his In the way of seeing and responding to the world around him – a book of intricate line drawings attracted him, and later, a photo became a window into his family’s story. D’Ambrose’s play reflects the depth of sensitivity in children, who watch and hold their breath, while adults convince themselves that they haven’t messed things up.
For Jesse, that meant dealing not only with his parents’ divorce, but their subsequent marriage, with bad news in a different way (new spouse by Matthew Hammond and Myxolydia Tyler). It will mean knowing how his father was brought into a delicate and wounded life by Darcy James, how he fought for validation and redemption amid gridlock and collapse, and struggling to find words.
Full credits 800
Dealer: Mubi
