Stanley's House

In 2003, documentary filmmaker Tobe Carey discovered that the house he had grown up in on Woodford Street in Worcester, MA, was also where the renowned American poet Stanley Kunitz lived as a boy. Carey's childhood bedroom, in fact, was the same as Kunitz's 30 years previously. Carey reached out to Kunitz, as well as to the current occupants of the house (who moved in after Carey's family left in the 1970s), resulting in Stanley's House, a film built around the one-time U.S. Poet Laureate's powerful connection to his early home. Kunitz, who died at age 100 in May 2006, witnessed a lot of change in Worcester, and the film interweaves reminiscences and scholarly interviews with archival material concerning the city's evolving history (particularly regarding its Jewish community) and footage of Kunitz at various poetry readings. Kunitz's most autobiographical verses concern the house, surrounding community (mostly woods when he was a boy), his father (who committed suicide before Stanley was born), stepfather (who died when Stanley was 14), mother (who built the house on Woodford Street), and two sisters. In a moving segment, Carey films Kunitz in a private reading of his “Three Floors” (the house has three levels, plus a basement in which many of the Kunitz family's possessions still reside) four days before the writer died. History is piled on top of history in this fascinating film, as Carey's own family offers significant memories of living in the house for decades, while the new owners are faithfully restoring the place to be, in part, a writer's retreat. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)