The best film opening in Chicago this week can’t be found at the multiplex, or Facets, or the Gene Siskel Film Center, or in the private projection booth whirring continuously in your brain, the one your doctor keeps urging you to do something about.
It’s called “Must Read After My Death” (*** 1/2), a bloodcurdling 75-minute diary assembled from an astonishing stash of audiotapes and Dictaphone recordings, cries and whispers out of one documentary filmmaker’s family history. It opens in limited theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles. Everywhere in between, director Morgan Dews’ film goes out digitally as a “broadband cinema” offering.
Beginning at 9 a.m. Friday, the doc is yours for three days of unlimited viewing for $2.99 at giganticdigital.com. Mark Lipsky, president of Gigantic Releasing and a former Miramax Films marketing head as well as an Independent Film Channel alum, acknowledges that “anybody can throw a movie up on the Internet and call it a ‘release.’ But we’re a bona fide distributor.”
The film is fascinating, a microbudget, macro-interest project whatever the platform.
The psychosexual angst roiling under the surface calm here makes “Revolutionary Road” look like “Hotel for Dogs.” Allis and Charley, the filmmaker’s grandparents, had four children and lived in Hartford, Conn. Charley was an insurance executive, working four months out of the year in Australia. Allis, like Charley, had been married before, though unlike her second husband she was well-traveled, multilingual, a bohemian in homemaker’s clothing whose second husband’s insecurities, rage and alcoholism set all sorts of booby traps for those around him.
When traveling, Charley would send audio diaries back home, and Allis and the kids reciprocated. Early on we hear Charley talk about various women he had met. “Hope you’re having some fun and frolic yourself,” he says to Allis on one of the tapes, now more than a half-century old.
Theirs was an open if profoundly uneasy marriage. What we see and hear in “Must Read After My Death” — the title comes from Allis’ note pinned to the secret stash of audiotape found by Dews after his grandmother’s death in 2001 — peels back layer after layer on an American family that may not be typical in many respects, but whose public masks and private crises are unsettlingly universal.
The film’s not perfect. The musical score is banal, and thematically we’re dealing with material other family-history documentaries, notably “51 Birch Street,” have explored. But this one’s very rich.
Some of the tape-recorded arguments (why did they tape so much?) are riveting. The rewards and perils of psychotherapy; the parameters set, and tested, by any two mismatched people trying to make a life together, it’s all here.
Gigantic Releasing’s Lipsky believes the online releasing strategy is the only one left to truly independent filmmaking in the 21st Century.
“Theatrical is dead,” he declares, regarding low-budget, off-Hollywood indies. “There used to be something called word of mouth, and a film could find its audience, find its legs.” These days, however, “if the opening weekend box office isn’t significant, the film’s gone in a week. Even if the reviews are good.”
Lipsky harbors few illusions about getting rich quickly, doing things a new way. But, he says, “we’re prepared for 2,500 concurrent views online throughout the weekend.” The film’s site: mustreadaftermydeath.com.
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mjphillips@tribune.com
‘The Envelope Please’: At 6 p.m. Saturday on WGN-Ch. 9, Michael Phillips will appear for an Oscar preview with WGN’s Dean Richard, CLTV’s Marcus Leshock and N’Digo’s Bonnie DeShong.
