Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Handsome and touching, but...
Director Burstyn and his producer-writer wife Barbara Sumner Burstyn spent four years off and on documenting the daily lives of Peter and Colleen Karena and their six children to make this moving, if sometimes incoherent documentary. That patience earned their subjects' trust and lends the film a rare level of intimacy.
Fringe-dwellers in the best sense, the Karena family seem at first like semi-feral hippies, eking out a living from the bush, where Peter shoots deer and pigs while the kids ride bareback in the wild.
Peter and Colleen make an old-fashioned couple: she, perpetually pregnant, minds the house, while he sharpens knives and cleans guns and rides. But in revealing monologues delivered to an unseen interviewer, they talk about their lives - and particularly their children - and we cannot fail to be moved by their wisdom and humility, as well as their striking physical presence.
The film brings its characters slowly into focus: sparing voiceover narration is by the eldest child, Llewellyn, but mostly we are left to catch on at our own pace, even at the cost of jarring narrative jumps. And Burstyn, a cinematographer with an artist's eye, is as alive to the striking detail (the drip of blood from a slaughtered pig; a smile of delight at a rediscovered photograph), as the grand, stirring image (naked swims on horseback in the river).
That said, I'm not sure that the film can entirely escape the charge of romanticisation. It cultivates the idea that the Karenas live in reclusive bliss but gradually we realise that the kids go to school, the family to church and Peter runs a horse-trekking business with a website presence. It also asks us to take as read Peter's characterisation of his stepfather: he certainly seems like a jerk, but the way the film treats him on screen is unfair and at odds with the prevailing tone.
It's hard not to feel that the film-makers, who are enamoured of their subjects and plainly abandoned any detachment early on, are not playing fair with us: big loving families with dads who like hunting are not exactly two-a-penny, but "this way of life" is perhaps neither as unusual nor as under threat as this otherwise fine film seeks to imply.
Director: Tom Burstyn
Running time: 85 mins
Rating: PG
