ARTISTIC SANDWICH

REBECCA MILLER SPEAKS OUT ON THE MOTHER OF ALL SUBJECTS: HER PLAYWRIGHT FATHER

dinner parties, so I was expected to just go under the table,” she said of her father and her mother, the esteemed Austrian photographer, Inge Morath. “And there was a big trestle in the middle and I would lie on this five-inch trestle because I was very narrow and just listen and be in my own imagination. ..

“It’s a life that’s gone now, a life of artists who believed that if a coffee pot was broken, you welded it back together. It wasn’t a fancy life and it was very much about work and about decency in a certain way. I remember the McGovern fundraiser in the barn that my father had when I was a kid. I wore purple hot pants thinking I was just so cool. And the Styrons and the Calders and all the people who lived in those hills in those days were there. They were bohemians in a way,buttheywerealsovery straight people. It wasn’t a bohemia or even Bloomsbury. They weren’t sleeping around. They were just hardworking people who drank a lot of wine at night.”

Miller, 55, has sky-blue eyes and long, dark wavy hair and is wearing a delicate cream blouse with origami sleeves, high-waisted black pants, and on her fingers jewelry given to her by her husband: an oval aquamarine ring and a French Claddagh ring — a heart with a fleur-de-lis.

I tell Miller that I was so strongly affected by Death of a Salesman when I read it in high school that I started crying when my brother told me he had gotten a job as a salesman. In her film, Miller interviews Mike Nichols, who directed a revival of Death of a Salesman on Broadway in 2012, and Nichols wonders if Arthur Miller “burned something out” when he wrote that play because “he came so close to the target.”

“I think there was almost a mystical property to the creation of that play,” Rebecca Miller agrees. “That remained a mystery to him for the rest of his life. How do you write that first act in one night? It’s almost a visitation. It was a raging fire that went through him.

“It’s an interesting story because, of course, part of the play is talking about the wrong dreams and how our society has built people up to want things that maybe they canneverhave,sotheyfeel like failures when really all the things that they need are right around them. But, early on, he said he was standing in the back of the theatre once and he saw many people crying, and he was like, ‘Oh, my God, did I make this too sad?’ That the pathos of Willy was so enormous that maybe no one was going to remember any of the social criticism.”

His daughter, growing up in a time when his reputation had fallen off, felt compelled to offer a vision of her father as she saw him. She began shooting VHS tapes of him when she was 21. “I realize, you know, that this is my sixth film but it’s also my first film,” she says. “I spent 18 months cutting it. It was quite an emotional process for me.”

She felt there was “a huge gap” between the cozy storyteller she saw at home, who enjoyed woodworking, and the cool intellectual she saw in interviews.

“He had a remoteness in interviews, because he was a shy person and he was very protective of himself, understandably at that point,” Miller says. “It was a feeling like, his warmth and his humour would never really come through.”

It was strange, she admits, to work on the sections about his first two wives, Mary Slattery and Marilyn Monroe. “How do you express his vulnerability with these women?” she says. “Which was a surprise to me. Because he had been lovely and jokey and cuddly with me, but he was hardly a romantic figure to me. That’s not how I saw him.”

Rebecca Miller found that portraying her father’s passionate romance with Monroe was “very tricky.”

“I felt sometimes almost that I shouldn’t be in the room, I shouldn’t know all this stuff,” she says. “There was this one moment that we created a scene with still pictures where he seems to be looking at her and she’s standing there and he says, ‘You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met.’ It was weird, but that was also the moment where I sort of transformed from a daughter into a filmmaker.”

She puts one of her father’s searing love letters to Marilyn up on screen, reading: “So be my love as you surely are. I think I shall be less furiously jealous when we have made a life together. It is just that I believe that I should really die if I ever lost you. It is as though we were born the same morning when no other life existed on this earth. Love, Art.”

About a year after his split from Monroe, Miller began dating Morath. “I am discouraged with myself, my rootlessness,” he wrote to her. “And ashamed too. I can’t talk to anyone but you about so many things. I feel haunted sometimes by the question of whether anything, any feeling, is eternal.”

If Miller had to summon her nerve to deal with the lusty and sorrowful side of her father that bubbled up with Marilyn, she also had to summon her nerve to deal with the most disturbing part of the documentary: the institutionalization of her younger brother, Daniel, who was born in 1966 with Down syndrome.

She was asked to make the film in the mid-’90s, but demurred because her parents were alive and she had not yet discussed her brother in interviews.

“I didn’t really know how to approach it,” she says. “Because it was a delicate subject for them and it was very personal and they were very private people. And it was a tender point for my mother, especially, and I felt very protective over that. But I also felt a filmmaker’s need to be honest. And I felt, if I’m doing this portrait, I’m going to have to do it. And as I say in the film, my father did offer to do an interview.”

He died in 2005, at 89, before that was accomplished.

It would have been revealing. The playwright known as the moralist of the century for his work and his brave refusal (backed by Monroe) to name names during the McCarthy era, the playwright who focused on fathers and sons, ended up virtually wiping his own son out of his life; Daniel was not mentioned in Arthur Miller’s memoir, Timebends, nor in his obituary in The New York Times. He was also not cited in Morath’s Times obituary.

In the film, Rebecca Miller shows her father’s journal entry from 1968: “As the nurse was dressing Daniel in the hospital, preparing him for our journey to the institution, I turned to examine him — with some difficulty. In a few seconds I found myself, not doubting the doctor’s conclusions, but feeling a welling up of love for him. I dared not touch him, lest I end by taking him home, and I wept.”

If she had done the interview, Rebecca Miller says, she thinks her father would have said this: “That they were advised to do it. That he believed that it was the right thing for our family. It’s a subject that was just hard to broach in my family. And when you’re raised like that, it’s not easy to just overcome that right away.”

Rebecca Miller’s work has been called the “feminist, non-creepy” version of Woody Allen. Ethan Hawke says that being directed by Miller is “like being directed by Annie Hall.”

“Look, this is a difficult subject,” she says of Allen. “What he does inside a frame, he’s moving and he’s moving people around within it. He’s a great artist in that sense. As for the rest of it, it’s a debate. You know, my husband won’t go to see any Wagner operas because he was an anti-Semite, right? If you only appreciate artists who have been good people, who’s going to be left for us to appreciate? And I do think that I can’t unlearn what I learned from Woody Allen.”

She adds: “What I worry about with the #MeToo thing is that women are getting addicted to the victim’s role. And that’s not going to get us anywhere in the end, right? Maybe what I worry about is, it’ll kind of, in some weird way, put the screws on and make us all really afraid of sex. And that somehow, it’ll end up backfiring for women. Somehow, we’ll end up with the short end of the stick.”