Death: A Love Story
First screened and reviewed in December 2018
Director: Michelle LeBrun. Documentary about the filmmaker and her husband, Mel Howard, as they navigate his liver-cancer diagnosis and his various paths to treatment, which may or may not be paths to personal enlightenment. Twitter Capsule:
Curious blend of a loving memento made only for oneself and an attempt to circulate inchoate ideas more widely.
VOR:③
The process of dying and specifically the choices negotiated by those about to die are so rarely depicted that even this uneven chronicle is valuable.
Am I really going to sit in judgment of someone's pained but loving record of her husband's fatal decline? For chrissakes, am I giving it a grade? It seems that I am, if only because Michelle LeBrun submitted to festivals her fond, sad, intermittently sentimental profile of her dying husband, the influential film artist and faculty mentor Mel Howard. Evidently urged by friends to film their medical consultations, hospital visits, and high-stakes intramarital conversations about mortality, Michelle and Mel show a surprising stamina for keeping their video cameras running while doctors deliver grim news and grueling "treatments," while shamans and healers attempt to nourish Mel's spirit, and while both of them debate the relative value of long lives and good lives, if those must be posed as alternatives. The images are rarely if ever beautiful, and who would expect them to be? Even amid compelling locations, as in the couple's final trip to Joshua Tree before Mel starts chemotherapy, the focus remains on words and feelings, sometimes expressed directly to the camera, sometimes caught from fly-on-the-wall perspectives. For some reason, many such conversations, especially indoors, push everybody's head down to the bottom of a mostly-vacant frame. I wasn't sure if LeBrun was conflating visual inelegance with a claim on authenticity, or if everyone just had more to worry about than principles of composition, even as LeBrun confesses that exercising her artistic mettle was a welcome, engrossing distraction amidst all the heartache, panic, and tedium.
Partially for these reasons, and partially because LeBrun and Howard never quite connect with the camera as richly as they connected with each other, Death: A Love Story doesn't hit the same emotional peaks as a proximal film like Silverlake Life. That 1993 landmark of domestic hospice work evoked the process-unto-death in ways that reflected the couple's own gifts for intimacy, and the way any experience shared between couples can operate on a series of chaotic frequencies: arguments that are also oaths of allegiance that are also rehearsals for parting that are also mundane errands. Death: A Love Story features a few such moments, like a dinner out with friends who want to make ribald humor out of Mel's imminent demise, or a curt moment when he verbally and physically shushes a clearly-steamed Michelle as she tries to voice some queries during his phone conversation with a specialist. Much more often, LeBrun's self-appointed task is to offer viewers a chronicle of mortality with which anyone can identify—later if not sooner. Big Questions kind of supplant singular impressions, which doesn't make this a less valuable record but does change the kind of cinematic experience it becomes for those of us outside their sphere of acquaintance. Watching the cycles of optimism and skepticism regarding Mel's prognoses, absorbing the frustration of loved ones and professionals who want the patient to commit more fully to his own longevity, and witnessing the depletion of Mel's body even as his mind feels released into new equanimities, new journeys, new health: these are all moving, upsetting, illuminating cycles to observe. The lens on everything does feel personal but not in a way, for better or worse, that centers details that make Michelle's and Mel's couplehood distinctive. What does it mean to marry for the first time later than most, with a significant age difference between partners, and be contemplating a possible funeral less than three years later? How have stories of the Shoah, passed down to Mel through his family, impacted his regard for death but also for life? We hear just enough from these angles to be intrigued, but in many ways, these two present themselves as an Everycouple.
The main sign of what we might call shared idiosyncrasy that Mel and Michelle admit is their growing attraction to alternative medicines and mysticisms, whether to balm and strengthen their bodies or, at least, to fortify their minds and souls if outcomes cannot be changed. Within their regional and kinship milieus, especially in the mid-to-late 90s, these may not have felt like eccentric practices at all, and I'm not inclined to construe them that way. As a filmmaker, though, LeBrun seems aware that her audience won't all share these languages, regimens, or beliefs. I wish they didn't feel assimilated into a sort of pan-Eastern, polyglossic language of "transcendence," with Buddhist bells, faceless choirs, and hard-to-place instruments conjuring a broad ambience of what is Spiritual. When LeBrun pans over shelves upon shelves of herbs and extracts, hoarded for any succor they might offer to Mel, the gliding camera movement itself seems to consolidate them distantly as Chinese Medicine, rather than implying a complex field of specifics. But it also doesn't feel right for me to weigh in much about what did or did not ease this married couple's passage through a heartbreaking ordeal. I can curb my pronouncements about whether the cultural politics embedded in Mel's final months feel totally coherent or duly self-reflexive. Death: A Love Story ends with a series of koans, oaths, and apostrophes and a repeated pattern of the camera zooming or tracking backward from the same images to which it previously pulled closer. The techniques are not subtle, and nor are the archetypal figures of fire and water that often accompany them as superimposition or abstract montage. Still, the effect remains sobering and stirring. The fact of death sits there, stubborn. The impression of a love story radiates credibly through, around, and despite that death. We should all be so lucky. Grade:B–
