Tarnation

Tarnation (88 min, Unrated)
Faced with the haunting remnants of his past, including a family legacy of mental illness, Jonathan Caouette returns to his native Texas to aid in his mother's recovery from a lithium overdose. Caouette has been documenting his life since he was eleven years old, and in TARNATION we watch him grow up on camera, seeking escape from family trauma through musical theater, grade-B horror flicks and the forging of his identity through popular culture. He weaves a psychedelic whirlwind of snapshots, Super-8 home movies, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, snippets of 80s pop culture and dramatic reenactments to create an epic portrait of an American family torn apart by dysfunction and reunited through the power of love. "As raw and personal as a movie can be, the equivalent of a cinematic journal or diary. But it's also artfully constructed and articulated, written, edited and musically designed with often jolting brilliance." -- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE "Caouette has taken the broken pieces of two lives and slowly, painstakingly, pasted them together -- and created one superb work of art." -- Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER