This documentary pulls together oral history to trace a very specific New York chapter of gay life in America. Back in 2014, someone found a box stuffed with hundreds of letters sitting in a storage unit in LA. These letters went all the way back to the 1950s and were written to a young guy named Reno Martin, who'd later become known in Hollywood as agent Ed Limato. When Martin left home to chase a radio career, his closest gay and queer friends kept writing to him just to stay in touch. Every letter's signed with a fake name and ends with a warning to burn it after reading, which tells you everything about an era when just being gay, or dressing in drag, could get you thrown in jail. The filmmakers actually tracked down the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, and turned what could've been dry historical digging into something genuinely personal and intimate. The people behind this doc found the original letter writers themselves, several of whom are stil...
Kenneth has just died, and his estranged son Martin comes back to the family home in Cape Cod all the way from New York. They had not been in contact for years. What Martin did not know was that after his mother passed, his father came out and had been in a relationship with his gardener, Ted, who is now left behind grieving alone. These two strangers, one the son, one the partner, have to sit across from each other and figure out funeral arrangements and what life looks like after. Their dynamic keeps flipping between weirdly funny and genuinely sad, partly because the man Ted describes with such love barely resembles the father Martin carries in his memory. The house is where things really get thorny. Martin sees it as something to sell, and a relentless real estate agent keeps popping up to push that agenda further. Ted sees it as the place where his whole relationship with Kenneth lived, and he wants to stay. Martin is not exactly rushing to hand over something he considers his right to deal with. The film gives both of them a fair hearing though, and to its credit it does not make either of them the obvious villain. There is also an old friend of Martin's who comes back into the picture along with her family, which pulls him back into his Cape Cod childhood for a bit. Really though it is that friction between the closed-off, uptight Martin and the grieving, raw Ted that the whole film runs on, as Martin tries to sort through a tangle of things he has been avoiding for a long time.
This film is asking real questions. What does it feel like to lose someone you never really made peace with? How do you sit with another person's warm and beautiful memories of someone who hurt you? Martin is not anti-gay, that is made clear, but he cannot get his head around his father spending decades hiding who he actually was. And what really stings is finding out that this open, warm, beloved version of his dad existed for Ted and for the whole community around them. That person was nowhere to be found when Martin was a kid and genuinely needed him. Ted is dealing with his own pile of stuff too, money stress, no clear career path, anger, grief, just a general feeling of being unmoored, and he acts out because of it. The thing is, all of that would hit so much harder if we actually knew who Ted was before Kenneth came into his life. That backstory is the biggest thing the film is missing, and without it Ted never fully becomes a person, just a collection of reactions. The actors work with what they have and do a decent enough job. The budget is clearly limited but Cape Cod genuinely looks beautiful on screen, and the film has a quiet sweetness to it even when it is frustrating. A tighter script and a bit more character history would have lifted this into something more satisfying. Instead the ending just kind of shows up and resolves itself without really earning it. (6/10)
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