Alfieri's The Sisters

The Sisters (2005)

03 Oct 2012

    Richard Alfieri’s 2005 film adaptation of Anton Chekov’s The Sisters, by the same name, is both brilliant and disturbing.  As is usual, I tend to miss the point extolled by the jacket commentator:  “… the story of familial deception and ultimate revelation … [and] the ties that bind them despite their dysfunctional family dynamics…”

   What I am missing is the sense of family dynamic – in fact, to my reading of the film, the action is defined specifically by the lack of family dynamic.  There is no family.

   The issue of the male child in the family is removed from consideration by the omission of the female matriarch – the mother died long before the story’s narrative begins – with no exploration but the minimal side references of bitterness, Marcia redirects from hostility she feels towards her mother, onto her father.  The makes even more intriguing the repressed sexual anger and tension between her and her father.  Clearly, her husband is nothing more or less than a surrogate father figure – of this the narrative is quite clear.

   What we are left with is the incidental relationship amongst four grown women (for this, the character of Nancy (Elizabeth Banks), is of larger impact than that of Andrew, the brother (Alessandro Nivola).  Leaving the cast of relevant characters as Marcia Prior Glass (Maria Bello), Olga Prior (Mary Stuart Masterson), and the youngest sister, Irene Prior (Erika Christensen).

    To my mind, there are two themes – and I think it important to reiterate that this play reflects the perspectives of two men – Alfieri, the writer, and Chekov, the originator, and to a lesser extent, director Arthur Seidelman, another male, and to explore the following with that clearly in mind.

    First off, the dynamic we see is not a family dynamic but rather the accidental collection of four independent alien wills.  Marcia hits the nail on the head when she retorts to Andrew that he is no longer a meaningful relative, but has become merely a casual genetic acquaintance.  What Marcia misses is that they are all devolved to the point of being merely casual genetic acquaintances.  The family that remains is very distant and very tired – it is hardly a family, more a collection of casually related acquaintances such as one would meet in a formal teacher’s lounge.  Coincidentally, it is such a teacher’s lounge rather than a warm, inclusive family home in which the film is set – and where the protagonists seemingly choose to celebrate their family get-togethers.

    The dynamic is not one of siblings struggling to stick together in mutually supportive relationships – I find Andrew to be the only character to demonstrate such humanity – than that as a FOIL against which the sisters’ actions and attitudes might be gauged.

    What we find is a battle of self-focused ego-id identities, each struggling to establish and maintain their own place in the world, alone, but drawing resources from the jointly-maintained fable of the nuclear family – and each tightly bound to this fable.

    Marcia, the eldest, stepped up to the plate when their mother died – playing host for the father, raising the children and being mommy to the youngest daughter, just a child at the time.  Intelligent, energetic and dutiful, The Sisters is mostly about Marcia’s failure to maintain the family despite the absence of the mother and the ineptitudes of the father.  Unable to bear the stresses and the strains of such a position, the constant stress slowly wore down her abilities to cope until she turned herself into the part-time institutionalized care of her marriage to a professional psychiatrist (with literary ties to F. Scott FitzGerald’s Dick Diver in Tender is the Night).  The point of her madness being either the trauma of her rape/molestation by her father or her repressed frustration at not being able to fully take the place of her absent mother – and to assume that position in all her filial roles.  At one point, after Marcia assumes the role of matriarch and reprimands the wayward sister-in-law, the tables are turned and Nancy claims that Marcia will never have children because of her madness.  Perhaps that is the most superficial reading of the film, for in many ways Marcia has already had a family – that point in her life is done.  The madness perhaps then stems not from the trauma, but from her inability to move on from a role that no longer has any meaning into a new life that does.

    The second sister, “the dutiful son,” has been keeping the family in contact – presumably it is her position as College Chancellor that provides access to the faculty club.  The fact that she is a closeted lesbian bears little import to the film apart from the fact that she has evolved into two identities that separate her from her sisters.  She has moved on and embraced an academic career with responsibilities and stability – no one else in the film succeeds in those goals.  That they family does not realize that she has moved on and have very little clue as to her lesbian identity or lifestyle serves mostly to illustrate the point to which the family has ceased to care for each other and truly communicate.  The Prior family has become a mere formality presented to the public, nourishing three separate narratives that have long ago cut their ties to each other.  What does Olga get out of the family?  A respectable, perhaps even professionally intimidating, family closet and an unquestionable context for her hidden identity.

    Did I say four narratives?  Yes.  The character of Nancy, Andrew’s low-brow wife embodies the outsider.  Her key lines in this regard are contained within her speech on sophistication – “You are not nearly as sophisticated as you think you are, or as I thought you to be.”  There are only three narratives to the acknowledged family story.  Andrew, fends for himself – can’t even dress himself, make a dignified impression in public or marry well on his own.  He is excess genetic material and Nancy is just his wife – unknowingly justifying the cynicism with which the sisters judge Andrew who is bearing, perhaps has long borne, the scorn the sisters hold towards the father, being redirected at the only other male in the household.  Nancy never makes it into the family unit – she is determinedly excluded – perhaps there is a danger that a another female could expose the sham family unit for what it is – and definitely threatens the faded image upon which both of the elder sisters’ public image is at least somewhat based.

    As for Andrew, again, his chief role is to be hushed.  None of the males in the story are allowed to speak – including Andrew who finally rebels by selling the house, ending the mirage and thereby euthanizing a very sick traditional family unit.

    Finally, we have Irene, the youngest.  Surely the film focuses on the family’s attempts to care for their youngest member and to see her become successfully of age?  Perhaps, but then why is the family completely unaware of her drug use?  Why did she find it necessary to use drugs?  Why did it fall to the stalker boyfriend to save her life just after a family party held in her honor?  Simply put – the family was loudly celebrating their caregiver and nurturing role – an imaginary success.  In reality, no one cared for Irene because they were all wrapped inside their own needy egos.  In a healthy, extent family, Irene’s wellbeing would have been the end or goal of the family’s very existence.  In the end, it was the appearance of family, not Irene’s wellbeing, that was the goal or raison d’être for the family’s continued existence.  Irene might as well have been an heirloom clock. 

    Andrew calls the sisters’ bluff when he sells the family home that Irene and her new husband (Chris McDonnell) were planning to move into.  This was the perfect imagery for the sister’s personal and public need for ego-sustenance – but it was a mirage.  Andrew had been maintaining an empty symbol with no assistance.  No one had visited the house for over a decade.  The family had died and no one even knew it – that is until the checks were passed out.

    Most humorously to myself, all of this happens in an amongst a gathering of academic psychiatrists and communications specialists – and yet every single one, including the good Doctor, are too self-absorbed to note what is really going on.  They were not viewing the coming of age of the youngest daughter, they were witnessing the death of the family.

    The second theme is of particular interest to those engaged in gender studies.  Having four sisters, a deceased mother and a father who has fallen in esteem, my own biographic reading of this movie would seem somewhat relevant.  To me, I see not only the selfish focus of the individuals on their own egos and ids but the genderization of space.  The sisters freeze out Andrew, the father and their male partners by genderizing the “family” space and putting up a wall that no male can penetrate – that is except Dr. Gary Sokol, whose caustic witticisms are in reality well-aimed darts at what he perceives as a purposeful action about which there is nothing

he, or any of the other males, can do.

    Not only is the space gendered but so are the relationships.  Each of the women lay claim to the family dynamic to deal with their own individual needs – as women.  Marcia needs the formal, respectful family so she can be the formal, respectful hostess-wife her husband so needs.  Olga needs the respectability of the formal family to protect and maintain her filial closeted identity.  The youngest – Irene needs the family sisterhood to exist so that she can justify not dealing with reality – when the sisterhood fails to protect her, she turns to drugs – that is until she can find a submissive man to whom she, and the sisterhood, can safely entrust her own ego and id.  With the house gone, and facing the very real possibility that she might have to depend on the masculinity of her fiancée as a shield apart from even a sham family, her confidence clearly wavers and she questions her future mate as to why she would be interested in or able to depend on the type of relationship he could provide her.  Nancy, she is rejected – she thought she was marrying into a supportive, loving family but this was a mirage.  Her needs for emotional and relational sustenance cannot be met in a rapidly diminishing pool and threaten to take increasingly insufficient resources from the real sisters.  Ironically, it is for her well-being, and that of her unborn child, that the family is disbanded the only real resource left – being the house, is sold to fund her very real needs over those of the sisters who need the house to maintain a myth.

 

    Still, every single woman is playing the chick card and each seems to be doing it for their own selfish reasons.

    I definitely recommend viewing and discussing this film – but not on a bright sunny day.  Like other reflective movies, A Single Man (2009) and Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste)(2005) come to mind, The Sisters might be best served with a whiskey and soda on a gloomy, rainy afternoon.