FAR FROM THE TREE, documentary, not rated; Center for Contemporary Arts, The Screen;

Sometimes things just don’t turn out the way you expect. Applied to families and their offspring, this is the subject of Rachel Dretzin’s documentary, which is based on Andrew Solomon’s bestselling 2012 book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. Solomon, who is a major presence in the documentary, observes, “In telling these stories, I was investigating the very nature of family itself.”

Dretzin rounds up a large roster of families with children who do not fit into the dreams parents have when they find themselves expecting a little stranger. In addition to Solomon, who is gay, we meet a range of others. There’s Jason, who was born with Down Syndrome; Loini, born with dwarfism; and Jack, who is autistic. And then there’s Trevor, who at the age of sixteen slit the throat of an eight-year-old boy, and is now doing a life sentence behind bars. His father, staring helplessly at the camera, says, “The worst had happened, and it’s not going to be okay.”

Trevor is the only one we do not meet in person, although we see photos and home movies of him as a bright, apparently happy kid. But we sit in on his family having a normal conversation with him on the phone from prison. “How can you stop loving your child?” his mother asks plaintively.

For most of the others, while their differences may be the stuff of difficulty, they do not come across as tragedy. Loini grew up with a loving mother but she carried feelings of unbridgeable isolation until she attended a Little People of America convention and found a heart-filling sense of community. There she met Leah Smith and her husband Joseph Stramondo, a witty, fun-loving married couple who don’t accept the label of disadvantage. “I don’t need fixing,” Leah says forthrightly. But when she becomes pregnant, they hope for a “normal” child.

Solomon fought hard against his sexual identity before accepting it. Jack, who with his family endured years of frustration, finally learned as a teenager to communicate via a computer voice synthesizer and announced to his thrilled parents, “I’m trying. And I’m really smart.” Jason appeared on As an adult, that promise has tapered off, but he’s happy living with two similarly affected roommates, who call themselves The Three Musketeers.

lets us in on a world in which parents and their offspring deal with the unforeseen, and find both joy and heartbreak in the realities they live with. A lot of it is uplifting. However, some is not. As Leah asks, “How do we decide what to cure, and what to celebrate?”

— Jonathan Richards