blaming hannah
by Douglas
Messerli
Joshua
Kellerman (screenwriter and director) Be Gay Tomorrow / 2022 [13 minutes]
I might almost
have included this short dramatic comedy in my grouping of short films I discussed
under the rubric of “Family Secrets,” for there is most certainly a couple of
secrets that this family has long been attempting to keep from one another.
As the parents Mary (Stephany Hitchcock)
and Frank (Bret Bailey) arrive for Thanksgiving dinner at their recently
divorced daughter Hannah’s (Allie McCulloch) new small apartment everything
seems to be going wrong. While running out to the grocery store to get a few
more items, she has put her eldest son, Allen (Josh Rosenzweig) in charge of
listening for the timer so that he might turn the oven off; but as with so many
high school boys, he has retreated to his room and his cellphone, while the turkey
overcooks and begins to send smoke across the kitchen and into the living room,
setting off the fire alarm.
Hannah arrives just in time to air out the kitchen, turn off the fire
alarm, and find her son squirreled away in his room before she sets into scaping
off some of the burned parts before her mother calls to tell them they’ll be
there in 40 minutes.
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Although she tries to get her younger
daughter Nikki (Kealani Petito) to help out, she too is busy with a phone call.
The final frustration comes when she
attempts to get Allen to take down all his gay paraphernalia from his bedroom
walls, which he refuses to do, announcing he intends to come out to his
grandparents at Thanksgiving dinner.
Although Hannah seems totally accepting
of her son, she demands that he say nothing, and return to his gay life the day
after Thanksgiving, hence writer/director Joshua Kellerman’s short film’s
title. We, and evidently, her son cannot seem to comprehend why she is so
absolutely insistent that he not bring up issue with her parents. After all, he
argues these days it not such a big thing.
But when we finally meet her outward
loving parents we soon perceive just why she is nervous. Her father Frank is
the kind of grandfather who thinks wrestling with his grandson, far too old now
for his playful gestures, is the best thing he might do in order to reintroduce
some normative male presence into his life, that and constantly asking him
about his girlfriends, the grandmother assuring him that he is handsome enough
to get any girl. At one point Allen is so upset with his grandfather’s behavior
that he almost announces his gayness despite the constant attempts Hannah makes
in interrupt him, calling for more potatoes, gravy, etc, and staring him down
in anger and terror.
Even worse is Hannah’s mother, again
seeming to be a caring worried woman, but who we soon discover is constantly
comparing Hannah with her successful sister (she has just purchased a Pomeranian)
and attempting to prod Hannah to call up her ex-husband to see if he might join
them, despite the fact that Hannah reminds her that there is a court-order that
they cannot talk to one another. Obviously her husband has been abusive, but for
the ever-intruding, passively scolding mother that seems of little matter,
since she argues that she should have a man in her life to give her children a
much-needed father figure.
Hannah meets her constant intrusions into
the new life she has been trying to build for herself and her children with
some justified anger, but that does nothing to stop them, and she is finally
forced to take out a few moments in the bathroom just to collect her wits.
In her absence, however, Grandmother Mary
begs Allen to tell her what is the matter, why he is not eating and what is bothering
him, attempting to convince just to whisper the problem in her ear; at the
moment he finally does, the lights go out. Hannah has not paid the electricity
bill.
With the lantern lit, the grandfather
plays a game with the youngest boy, Danny (Townsend Fallica) while Hannah
attempts to get on line to pay the bill and return the lights. But her credit
card is declined, and her father is forced to hand over his card to her so that
she can return the fiasco to some sense of normalcy.
When the lights do return, her mother now
shows her real aggressiveness and interfering tendencies, suggesting she cannot
comprehend why Hannah is upset with them, when it is she who has fouled up,
admitting that she now knows Allen is gay, surely caused, she argues—typically
but mistakenly—by his not having a father figure around the house. It is
Hannah, she insists, who is blame for everything. Indeed, blaming Hannah seems
to be their favorite family game.
They leave, Hannah’s daughter suggesting
that the entire event was a “real fuck up,” while Allen comes to stand next to
his mother in support, as if to reassure her that she has been a good mother
and has done the best she could given the circumstances.
Later, the entire family sits on the
couch, eating popcorn, happy once more to be alone without the intruding
judgments of others. They are all free once more to happily be who they are.
Although, one wishes that Allen had been
a little smarter about it all and explained to them outright that his being gay
had little to do with having no father, but is probably inborn, and if
triggered by anything perhaps might be linked to how his father treated his
mother previously. But young teen gay boys do not yet necessarily have such
wisdom. And Kellerman’s work, although a bit hysteric, is probably fairly near
to the truth in some dysfunctional families. If there is any major criticism
about this short MLA work he did at Columbia University, I’d argue it is a bit
too close to being a Neil Simon comedy such as The
Goodbye Girl. But then that’s one of favorite Simon plays and
films.
Los
Angeles, December 8, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(December 2024).
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