Reviews of Ruth Leitman's award-winning film 'Alma'
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Creative Loafing article 2/98
Eat the Document
Ruth Leitman redefines the representation of real life on film
Alma Matters
Atlanta filmmaker Ruth Leitman recently spoke to a group of Grady High School
students about making documentaries. "What is documentary film?" Leitman asked as a
way of generating discussion.
"It's not dramatic," one student responded. "It's not entertaining," another chimed in.
Leitman laughs as she recalls these typical responses to a genre seen as synonymous
with cut-and-dried, pedantic endurance tests on groundhog mating habits and the
Constitution.
"We grew up with boring, National Geographic documentaries. That's what most people think documentaries are," the 36-year-old Cabbagetown director concedes, a misconception she hopes to remedy with her latest film, Alma.
Leitman's work is aligned with that of nontraditional documentarians including Errol Morris, Terry Zwigoff, Michael Moore and Ross McElwee, whose films challenge the verité director's supposed objective point-of-view, and refuse to toe the party line that the interview format, investigative reportage style of documentary is in any way a more truthful representation of real life.
A complicated, finely crafted film about local cult celebrity Margie Thorpe's troubled, incestuous relationship with her eccentric-waxing-demented mother, Alma questions documentary's ability to tell the entire truth about a person's life.
The film generated notice from The Village Voice, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety when, as a work in progress, it played New York's Independent Feature Film Market. Following a benefit screening this week in Atlanta,Alma will have its national debut at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin in March.
"I'm very intrigued by liars," Leitman confesses, explaining her interest in both Margie's mother Alma, and the teenage girls she docuented in her 1994 debut film Wildwood, New Jersey. "Lying is this thing I discovered as I was coming from adolescence into adulthood. Lying was something that adults did to get themselves out of trouble."
Leitman has found her definitive muse of contorted reality in Alma Thorpe, a colorful, sexually brazen 56-year-old who sports deposits of blush below her eyes, a Pekinese hair bow and the tragic air of a faded beauty. Alma's mind is as cluttered as her cockroach-ridden surroundings, and her motivations as obscured as her life inside the garbage-piled Atlanta home she shares with her brooding husband, Jim, comforters covering the windows to keep light and prying eyes at bay.
Alma is a psychological swamp of content and mood, suggesting Errol Morris, the Maysles Brothers' comparably icky Grey Gardens, Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews and fiction films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Like a gothic thriller dripping with fungal secrets whose mystery deepens at a syrupy Southern pace, Leitman's film slowly reveals the slippery, depressing truth lurking behind the combative relationship between Margie and her mother. It's a truth both purposefully and unconsciously avoided, obscured by Alma's flamboyant disregard for the facts, her electroshock treatments in the mid-'60s at the Milledgeville State Mental Hospital, and her own poisoned family history which included a rape by a relative at age 7 that Alma describes as her "first date."
By describing the rape in terms of a seduction, Leitman notes of Alma's motivations, "I think that there's a control issue involved. Like if she had control over it, then it won't seem as traumatic." These embellishments are central to Alma, who sugarcoats issues like her husband's alcoholism, describing Jim as "high on beer" until Margie rolls her eyes and corrects, "Druuuunk, Mom."
It's such evasions and psychological coping strategies which propel not only Alma but Leitman's earlier work, Wildwood, New Jersey, an impressionistic, often scattered look at the tacky Northern beach town and the precociously tarted-up teenage girls trolling its boardwalks like refugees from a Def Leppard video. The girls are the tough-talking epitome of the rough-hewn Jersey Girl, but underneath the nickel-plated exterior, Leitman shows the hearts of girls searching for true romance, unhappy with their bodies, saddled with bad home lives and grim economic prospects.
"Wildwood turned out a lot sadder than I expected it to be," Leitman acknowledges, "but I feel like underneath, the lack of opportunity for those girls was really sad."
A native of Philadelphia whose father inherited the family electrical appliance business and whose brothers became surgeons, Leitman was more economically privileged than the Wildwood girls she so closely identifies with. Blessed with a supportive family whose parents told her "You can do whatever you want," Leitman's background was anything but the story of parental abandonment and betrayal seen in her two films.
Leitman studied film and photography at Philadelphia's University of the Arts before settling in Atlanta in 1985, where she made a living as a photographer for a succession of local indie bands: Magnapop, Indigo Girls, the Black Crowes, and her husband Steve Dixon's band Reversing Hour.
"I wanted to move to a place where I could live and work on my own as an artist and not be a waitress," explains Leitman, who currently makes her home in a renovated laundry in Cabbagetown. "And I knew it was a real up-and-coming city."
"I think it's a good place for artists because it's relatively cheap. You can live here and work on your own and not really have to work that hard to make a living."
Though Leitman's privileged middle-class Jewish roots in some ways separate her from the more hard-knocks subjects she documents, Leitman sees a commonality between her own youth and the alternately world-wise and vulnerable Wildwood teenagers.
"I am sort of one of those girls from Wildwood ... in that you're sort of taught that if you give yourself up sexually, you're going to be in; things are going to be cool for you, and then it turns out to be a whole different thing." In many ways it's a lesson she shares with Margie Thorpe, whose sexual abuse manifested itself, in later years, in a promiscuity laced with dark psychological ramifications.
Both of Leitman's films, and the fiction script she's currently working on, about domestic violence, focus on the painful, pulpy insides of female experience. Though Leitman is in many ways closer to Wildwood because of her own girlhood sexual follies, it's the distant, alien world of the South and the singularly insular, crippled family of Alma which allow her to convey a remarkable truthfulness her previous film merely struggled toward.
"Ruth has made a very personal movie about some other people's lives," notes fellow lowbrow documentarian / artist Chris Verene, who rents an apartment above Leitman's in Cabbagetown.
Alma benefits from a narrowing of Leitman's focus from the scattered group-interview format of Wildwood, whose subjects' confessions are often compromised by smirking, judgmental friends standing next to them and the consummately cocky bravado of teenage girls grandstanding for their peers. Alma is also a more successful marriage of Wildwood's at times forced, superficial mix of heavy drama with light humor. Alma is comical, sad, and infused with the complexity of real life; of parents who did hurt their daughter, but are also damaged, quirky, amusing people. Alma proposes that there are no ultimate monsters, only people who are chronically flawed, and make poor choices.
"Despite dealing quite directly and seriously with the tragedy of Margie's youth," Verene points out, Alma "also shows how life is going on and how you can still love your mother even if she's totally crazy. And I come directly from that kind of thing in my own life."
Though Alma's press notes speak of the film in terms of the Southern Gothic tradition and Leitman admits to preparing for the film by watching every Tennessee Williams film available, Alma is as much in a personal vein for Leitman as an historical, literary one. Four years in the making, Alma continues the director's interest in female relationships and women's often tortured, difficult sexual identities. Both of her films display an interest in women-as-performers, whether the cocky teenagers roaming Wildwood's boardwalks, or the effusive, charming Margie and denial-prone Alma. Though the films are geographically juxtaposed -- each concerned with hyperbolically Northern and Southern subjects -- both treat the common female experience of putting up a brave front to ward off pain. As Margie notes of her own experience with this kind of female masquerade, "You don't want to bring everybody down."
Leitman can be as enigmatic as her documentary subjects, combining such astute, insightful visions of women's lives with an often blunt demeanor and a zealous concern for the marketing of her films. Leitman is her film's own spin doctor, attentive to the point of distraction with getting the proper press coverage for Alma. She is vigilant about the amount of ink devoted to promoting this most recent film, and how much will be "spilled" like wasted Biblical seed on her past work, Wildwood. There's a certain brusqueness to Leitman's manner and single-minded concern for promoting her work that can be off-putting. She's insistent over coffee at East Atlanta's Sacred Grounds that Creative Loafing offer the appropriate coverage of her work, instructing, "I'm hoping that you're going to focus more on Alma than Wildwood," and expressing an unusual concern -- rarely voiced by an article's subject -- with the focus of a story.
But one gets the feeling that beneath the self-aggrandizing persona is a filmmaker committed to documenting the complexity of women's lives and determined to tell the truth about them. And Leitman is partly justified in perpetually turning attention back to Alma. The work is far more intimate, focused, rich and thought-provoking than Wildwood.
"For me," Leitman confesses of her film, "this was really my stretching out, and making work that was very different. This is my next step to making a narrative film."
As her executive producer Peter Wentworth says, "Alma walks a fine tightrope quite beautifully in that it's very observational; it's not judgmental. There's no attitude toward [her subjects] that could happen with a lot of inexperienced or lesser filmmakers." Margie Thorpe is equally complimentary of Leitman's ability to penetrate her subjects without, as directors like Errol Morris or the Maysles have at times done, demeaning them.
"The last thing this needed to be was someone looking at odd, eccentric Southerners. And that's not what it is -- and I applaud her for that."
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE
ALMA
Directed by Atlanta Filmaker Ruth Leitman
The Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave. @ Second St. NYC. 10003 (212)
505-5181
OPENS Friday, September 22nd and runs through
Thursday, September 28th, 2000
Screening Times are nightly @ 7:00 and 9:00
P.M.
Margie Thorpe is a back sassin', whiskey sippin', country singin' Southern diva known to Atlanta bar hoppers as "Miss Margie." Behind her bravura, however lurks her mother Alma, a working-class Norma Desmond equipped with a twisted sense of logic, a rosy-hued memory, and an often disturbingly distorted
hold on reality. Ruth Leitman's feature-length documentary ALMA draws an intimate and darkly humorous portrait of the Thorpe family as Margie struggles with her mother's mental illness.
Please join us for the New York theatrical premier of ALMA at
The Anthology Film Archives,
32 Second Ave., @ Second St., New York, NY. 10003
For information:
212/505-5181 or Anthology Film Archives
The 2000 Whitney Biennial chose ALMA as a featured film. The Biennial catalog described ALMA as follows:
If Alma herself is Southern Gothic, Margie is Southern Pragmatic. The film belies the stereotype that working-class Southerners have little or no self-consciousness. Margie, who co-produced ALMA, is extraordinarily aware not only of the gap between her mother's perceptions of life and its reality, but also-potentially-of the breach in her own perceptions. And Alma herself, even with her deteriorating physicalhealth and gradual descent into psychosis, is not without the capacity for self-analysis.
In addition to appearing at the Biennial, ALMA won "best documentary" at The Hamptons International Film Festival, it has been broadcast on European and Canadian television and continues to screen at film festivals world wide.
Director Ruth Leitman and co-producer Margie Thorpe will be in attendance for the Friday and Saturday evening screenings, September 22nd and September
23rd.
*****Seeing and supporting films like ALMA, which not only entertain but make important social statements, is crucial to the continuance of this kind of responsible and ground breaking
filmmaking.
From Creative Loafing
Atlanta
Oct 22, 1999
Southern gothic
Alma documents a mother-daughter relationship steeped in secrets
BY FELICIA FEASTER
DOCUMENTARY FILM HAS a long tradition of driving a knife into the tender guts of the American family and revealing the myriad abnormalities dwelling behind closed doors. The bookend in this familial cinema is the Maysles' brothers' 1976 Grey Gardens,
which showed the clotted weirdness of mother and daughter kin to the regal Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis living in forgotten squalor. More recently, 1994's Crumb proved the anti-social, ulcerated vision of counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb didn't come from nowhere but was amply nourished in his normalcy-defying home life.
Likewise Atlanta's own entry into the We Are Family canon, Ruth Leitman's stunning Southern Gothic Alma, is the crown jewel in the local documentary canon, which references both Grey Gardens and Crumb. All of these films suggest family is the ground zero of our selves, the place that claims us no matter how we struggle
to extricate ourselves. Like a film about a soldier returning to the site of his most harrowing battle, Alma is a tale of recovery tinctured with the Southern assertion that you can never forget your past.
Released in 1998, Alma's ability to shock hasn't diminished with subsequent viewings. Though a distributor, perhaps spooked by its dark subject matter, has yet to pick up the film, Alma has been broadcast on Canadian and Finnish television and been included in international film festivals in Amsterdam and Munich and won the Documentary Feature Jury Prize at the Hamptons International
Film Festival.
Leitman's portrait of the enigmatic, difficult relationship between Atlanta's hipster girl-about-town, Margie Thorpe, and her off-kilter mama, Alma, single-handedly suggests there is more brewing in the land of cotton than boll weevils. As she digs ever deeper into Alma's own dark past, including a childhood rape that haunts her adult years, Leitman shows how the psychological umbilical cord of family is never cut -- that all the damage visited on the mother is revisited on the daughter.
Margie and Alma are equally engaging protagonists in a prototypical mother-and-daughter feud, which in Alma has a far more depressing backstory. Flip and ever-quick with the drawling irony of a jaded, sharp-tongued belle, Margie accounts for a great deal of the film's charisma, keeping Alma from sinking
into despair or self-pity. And Alma, a former country-fried beauty, ravaged over time by diabetes and inactivity, is an affectionate adversary, her distant voices and forgetfulness continually running interference with Margie's search for the truth. A brazen 56-year-old outspoken about her sexual desires, Alma is the apparent queen bee in her and somnambulist
husband Jim's filthy, cluttered hive -- a home where Margie says doors were perpetually left open, though secrets stayed
locked inside. But domestic violence, a life of disappointment, a difficult relationship with her own mama and a stint in the Milledgeville State Mental Hospital tell a far different story. As the plot thickens, Alma's troubled history of "turning on" men and self-professed "nymphomania" seem less a choice and source of pleasure than a tragic wound. And it's a wound that has also affected Margie, who laments her inability to connect with the
men in her life, as Leitman displays snapshots of her many boyfriends.
The same party girl demeanor Leitman captures in video clips of Margie's Miss Margie and the Tall Boys swing band and pouring hootch at the Star Community Bar turns out to be her flirtatious, extroverted coping strategy -- a salve much like
Alma's handy scripture. Though Margie and Alma's share an exceptional, wounded relationship, many women will see ripples of their own mother-daughter dialogue in this loving and combative pair.
A palimpsest of old family photographs, home movies, diary entries and recollections, Alma is a filmic evocation of the swamp of memory: layered, confusing and easy to get lost in. Leitman lets the truth of Alma and Margie's past unfurl gradually -- a tactic that allows the rhythm and deceptions of this family to sink in. Slowly the amusing eccentricity of the homebound Alma, with her delusions of supernatural communication, half-remembered scripture and therapeutic douches, reveals something more troubling -- that madness may be a convenient way to bury an unpleasant truth.
What begins as a case study of Southern eccentric Alma soon becomes a troubling examination of the secrets one family shares. What Margie seems unable to admit about her own past unfolds organically in Leitman's film. But the real triumph of the film is its refusal to tie up all its loose ends or reduce these lives to neat formula.
A searing, surprisingly funny, beautifully crafted family melodrama, Alma is also a brave gesture on Margie's part to reclaim her past. Subject and filmmaker become collaborators in this unique combination of therapy and artistic catharsis, which is never anything less than engrossing.
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