More bitter than sweet, director Morgan Dews’s painstaking documentary about his grandmother Allis’ troubled married life raising four children in Hartford, Connecticut is as much a time capsule of the Eastern Seaboard’s ’50s and ’60s era fascination with psychiatrists and questioning of social constraints as it is about a failed attempt at carrying on an open marriage.
Endless Dictaphone recordings, home movies, and photos help tell the story.
Dews discovered the materials, labeled by Allis with the film’s title, after her death in 2001 and set about learning the intimate details of Allis’ unconventional marriage to a temperamental insurance executive named Charley, of whom she never spoke after his death.
Allis and Charley were both married to other people when they met, and their mutual adultery set the stage for a disconnected union maintained via recordings that the couple would send back and forth while Charley traveled abroad on business and pleasure.
Upon his return the couple entered into analysis and Allis continued to secretly record aspects of their lives as a way of communicating with a stream of therapists that the couple compulsively met with, and exposed each of their children to, until Charley’s mysterious death.
Much of the film’s poignant punch comes from the surprisingly articulate and ardent voices of the couple’s three distressed boys Bruce, Chuck, and Douglas as they desperately shout to be heard above the din of their parents’ fighting, while their sister Anne remains uncomfortably quiet.
Complex and percolating with a cruel subtext of reckless psychiatrists, “Must Read After My Death” is deeply personal and troubling documentary.
(Gigantic Pictures) Not Rated. 73 mins.
