At TIFF, I watched Miss Bala, a movie on the Mexican drug war, sort of Scarface meets Kafka (which is an interesting choice, but makes for a too-cold feel, especially for a movie trying to be socially moving). I also watched Livid, the follow-up from the guys who made L'Interieur. That was the most disappointing of the bunch, a corny, unscary homage to those old Hammer horrors. I also watched Wuthering Heights, by that lady who made Fish Tank. It was a beautiful movie, but too bare (there was hardly any dialogue and zero music) and lacked passion.
And then I watched the pretty excellent The Patron Saints. And it's the most straightforward of the movies I watched: an elegaic documentary that's not quite 90 minutes about the residents of a nursing home. It opens with a shot of autumn woods. All the trees are bare, some taller than the others, some tilting further in the wind. Some heavy plastic-wrap, the kind used to bind furniture or firewood, is tangled in the branches. The camera pans from the trees to a high-rise. It's rust-colored, a color you really only see on airport hotels or, yup, old-folks homes.
The directors describe the movie as a portrait of the people that live there, but, like that opening shot, it feels also like a landscape. The Patron Saints is made up of short vignettes, each a few minutes spent with a resident, that combine in a spectrum of end-of-life. Each person breaking-down, their minds and bodies going. One patient, Rosemary, her face half-collapsed and her eyes in a perma-squint, looks as if she can barely handle the soft hospital light. Even though we meet her already-bedridden, there's a sense that she always lacked the capacity for a normal, sturdy life. Her brother used to rape and beat her, we learn. He also visits her in the home every Thursday. There's a scene where a nurse gives Rosemary some juice. Rosemary asks to hold the plastic cup, but she can't even and she spills on her shirt. "Am I human?" Rosemary asks, without malice, as the nurse leaves for the next room. "I don't think I'm human."
Jim, another resident and our sometime-narrator, says that the home is similar to the orphanages and prisons in which he has lived. In these types of institutions, freedom is limited. Freedom, for these old-folks, is a walk down the hall when they can manage it. Sometimes, it's a trip over to the activity room, where a visiting singer does a Spanish-guitar cover of Lionel Richie's 'Hello'. Rosemary, bound to a bed, asks a good question, referring to humanity in relation to confinement and a lack of freedom. But there's an easy answer: the people in this movie are so, so human.
Jim, for example, has a remarkable skill for telling stories. He is something of a guide for us and adds something vivid and only-human to a lot of the characters' stories. He tells us about a woman named LaToya, who we never actually meet. She was a huge woman who had to wear two hospital gowns, one on the front and one on the back. Huge, in large part, because of all the Chinese food she'd order. Boneless ribs. She also believed she was black: "She always thought the nurses treated her bad because of her color. 'What color is that, Toya?', I'd say. 'You're as white as me.'" There's a special irony in Jim's case since his mind is so sharp and since he's younger (45 or so) than the others. He's still strong so his confinement is more striking. Despite his lucidity, he thinks the nursing home is just a temporary thing, that all he needs to do to get back to a normal life outside is shave a hundred pounds off his three-hundred pound frame. Two nurses struggle to move him, via a crane, from his bed to his wheelchair. Every one of the residents is, in a sense, imprisoned. Jim, funny and charming, and Rosemary, weak and born-vulnerable, are on two sides of the spectrum. Yet, there's never any sense that either of them belong anywhere other than this place.
It makes sense, then, that these people are all welcoming of the camera and, by extension, the filmmakers holding it, and by further extension, the audience that gets to watch the movie. We get really close. One resident even says, "Gimme that," as she reaches for the camera and holds it by the lens. Her breath fogs the glass. The camera and the filmmakers and the viewers are welcomed proxies for loved ones. A priori to their imprisonment and the fragility is an everyday isolation. Friends and family don't mean the same thing for these people as they do for the young and sturdy. Real talk, the near-dead are still human, but, in a lot of ways, they are the hardest humans to chill with. It's an effort, for most, to look at them and be with them. One woman, Mary ("She used to make toothpaste for Colgate," Jim adds), talks about her son Walter. From behind thick glasses, she speaks in a high, almost childlike monotone and without punctuation: "My son Walter likes to be by himself because he's older so I let him try to be by himself so he could decide if he wants to stay by himself or come back to me." It's been years (decades?) since she'd last seen him, but every week she goes to the basement salon to get pretty for a visit that never-comes. Later, with her hair in new curls, she asks, "Walter, why won't you comes and see me?" Her voice and blank-expression are the same, but tears roll down behind her glasses.
This is a sad movie, but there are lots of moments of beauty and humor. As one woman works on her lunch, struggles with taking the paper wrapping off a straw, her roommate begs, over and over, "Gimme some coffee, please. Gimme some coffee, please." When the coffee doesn't come and the lunching woman sips double-double through the straw, her roommate's mantra changes: "I hope she chokes. Amen. I hope she chokes. Amen." There's vibrancy here, nuance that's only human. There's life, strange as it may look, even at the end-of-life.
