Father's Day

The personal documentary is a delicate thing, walking a fine line between self-absorbed indulgence and universal insight. Mark Lipman's Father's Day successfully manages this feat with equal measures of compassion, confusion, anger, and anguish, in an achingly human attempt to connect with a dead parent who cannot provide answers to difficult and highly personal questions. The culmination of a 20-year effort to understand his father's death at age 49 (a possible suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills, when Lipman was 17 years old), the film was originally intended as a sound-only documentary featuring Lipman's conversations with family members, but the filmmaker's decision to include home movies and impressionistic footage results in a psychological tapestry that's both deeply personal and immediately recognizable to anyone who has experienced similar loss in a seemingly happy yet ultimately dysfunctional family context. While not as effective as Crumb, Capturing the Friedmans, or the similarly themed 2003 documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey, Lipman's Father's Day is an anguished quest that leads (perhaps inevitably) to startling revelations about a father he barely knew. Unfortunately, the film is also weakened by the two-decade process of its creation--it feels cobbled together from disparate elements, suggesting that Lipman's a better diarist than a filmmaker. Still, this is a sincere effort that is laudable as a bold, vulnerable glimpse into complex familial relationships. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (J. Shannon)