Directed by Jonathan Caouette
Starring Renee Leblanc, Jonathan Caouette, Adolph Davis, Rosemary Davis, David Sanin Paz
Genre: Documentary / Biography
Country: USA
Runtime: 91 minutes
No MPAA Rating

Evaluation: 9.5/10
by Greg Ferguson









Jonathan Caouette entered the world cursed with much to resent and despair. Saddled with a single mother who was emotionally and physically abused by her parents and psychologically rent from electroshock therapy at their insistence, Caouette endured a particularly harrowing and scarring childhood and adolescence that was exacerbated by an emergent gay identity. All told, his was a life that variously involved uprooting and moving, foster care, abuse, victimization, depression, drugs, and suicide attempts. How he managed to persevere and survive is part happenstance and part willful determination to experience and attain peace, stability, happiness, and above all else an understanding of himself. Where others similarly afflicted may have sought and explored such things through companionship, writing, conversation, or other typical methods of therapy, Caouette coped by relying on his video camera. And so, at the age of thirty-one he has sifted through his old videos and resurrected other artifacts from his past in order to construct Tarnation, a sort-of video collage/scrapbook that synthesizes his life thus far, looks uncompromisingly at it, and makes a push forward into the future.

Tarnation is miraculous simply because it has obviously helped rescue this man's life. We see through his many filmed skits and performances how escapism provided him an outlet for his pain and allowed him to overcome the wretched circumstances of his life. Yet at other times, such as when his mother overdoses on lithium at the beginning of the film and he is wracked with fear and terror, the camera rolls on. Part of Caouette's character requires him to detach himself from his anguish and study it, as though he continues to be oddly fascinated by what face his sorrow wears. To him, it is especially important to see that he does not resemble his mother, for as dearly as he loves her, he confesses that one of his deepest fears is ending up just like her one day.

As indulgent as this film might seem (and, let's be honest, it is in many places), make no mistake - this film is not just a voyeuristic peek inside a troubled man's diary. Tarnation is also remarkable for Caouette's talent for filmmaking. Made quite inexpensively using the iMovie software that comes free with iMac computers, Caouette's jumble of images and kaleidescopic montages simulate the ebb and flow of his thoughts, while his detached third-person narration presents each of the events as though they comprised a fable. The approach is at once quite personal yet immediately accessible and artful; we are invited to share in his storytelling and bear witness to the many traumas and triumphs he's lived through. And as a tangential aside, Caouette, through his skits and performances, may have exposed himself as a hidden talent in the acting world, ready for mining.

By the end, I felt relief for Caouette and his mother and confident that his curse had been lifted. It is my sincere hope that he has found release from his demons and can embrace all that he ended up becoming, and all that he has to look forward to.

(This film was released on DVD on May 17, 2005, and may be rented from Spin-It Video Rentals, located at 15 Lewis St. in Moncton.)