In The Family
Wang’s debut deserves a wide audience
Patrick Wang’s terrific debut picture, In The Family, is a long, moving and extraordinarily intelligent drama, a story about families and children that is also, almost in passing, a study about the casual prejudice that can undo them. It could be called Chip Has Two Daddies if that title wasn’t already appropriated by one of the characters as an ironic shorthand: This is a movie about what “daddy” means, and the irony is shortlived.
It’s a considerable achievement, both in its understated conflicts and its underplayed acting: the potboiler material — two families fight for the son of a gay couple — is presented with measured reason and in scenes that run to such nat- uralistic length that you feel you’ve moved in with these people.
Not that it would be such a bad thing. Joey (Wang, a theatre veteran who also wrote the screenplay) is a contractor in modernday Tennessee, a calm craftsman who restores old houses and antique books with the same quiet care. Wang has a soft and resonant drawl that evokes a cowboy reassurance, and when women gather around him to offer comfort and casseroles, it feels legitimate.
He lives with Cody (soap star Trevor St. John), a laid-back but authoritative teacher whose wife died in childbirth while Joey was renovating their home. Out of the blue — whence all good things arrive — the men have become a couple, and the boy, Chip (six-year-old Sebastian Banes, a natural actor) is now their son. Chip is interested in dragons, and Joey carves one every week on a square of wood, then tells its story: It helps Chip get through the end of the weekend and face Monday.
Like Joey, Wang is also a patient craftsman, and In the Family takes place in measured scenes that require a becalmed audience.
The drama is set off when Cody dies in a car accident. We already can sense something is amiss: Joey can’t see him because, as a baffled nurse says, “only family members are allowed to visit at this time” and her quick glance at Joey tells us everything we need to know about the built-in suspicions of America — or the world. In the Family was made before Barack Obama experienced his evolution on the issue of gay marriage, but in its quiet way, it’s an explanation of what the formality can mean.
Joey mourns and carries on his life until Cody’s sister Eileen (Kelly McAndrew) reveals that Cody left a will naming her as Chip’s guardian. Joey is shocked.
“I am Chip’s dad,” he says. “Since when did that need explanation?” This is as exercised as Joey will become: Most of In the Family takes place under the surface, and the words that are never used in the film — words like “gay” or “Asian” — are deafening in their absence.
In the Family is finally a courtroom drama, but its court is an unusual and quiet place where we get just a taste of what “the law” means and then a larger helping of reason and compassion. It’s another long scene, but by then we are made comfortable by the hospitality of a lawyer played by Bryan Murray, an actor with an old, whiskey-voiced sense of wisdom that speaks of a lifetime of extracting justice. It’s an extraordinary performance in a small film that deserves a wide audience.