Director/photography: Doug Block
Writers: Doug Block, Amy Seplin
Editor: Amy Seplin
51 Birch Street is a type of documentary that seems to particularly appeal to me: tiny (even "small" is too big a word), concerned with the deceptively uneventful interior lives of an unremarkable family (usually suburban American), made by a member of the family with an inside view and access to wonderfully evocative material such as photos and home movies/video and featuring candid interviews with other family members and family friends. Tarnation is another example, though not as good as this. Capturing the Friedmans is better known, but made by an outsider and with a sensational story at its heart. Perhaps the best practitioner is Ross McElwee, notably his Time Indefinite.
I never seem to get tired of watching the veil pierced of an "ordinary American" family and how it reveals such sturm and drang, such powerfully resonant themes of desperation and endurance and passion, the great harm that people do one another and the great kindnesses too, and how much people are simply used up by the circumstances of their lives.
Professional wedding videographer and documentarian Doug Block goes against the grain of many such documentaries with this. The repressed, incommunicative father, the family breadwinner who perennially escapes into his work, turns out not to be what you would expect, nor does the freewheeling, more emotionally open mother, with whom Block feels a strong connection. 51 Birch Street plays expertly and deliberately on the familiar expectations wrought as much by "Oprah" and "Dr. Phil" TV productions as by other documentaries like this one, pointing you subtly in exactly the wrong direction, letting you come to your conclusions and make your judgments just before correcting you very much on that.
Block's parents, Mike and Mina, were married 54 years before his mother came down with pneumonia and suddenly died. They were a kind of storybook marriage in their circle of friends and neighbors—"storybook" for me starts at approximately the 25-year mark, and they had better than doubled that. So it comes as something of a surprise when, a few months after Mina's death, Mike announces that he has reconnected with a secretary who worked with him 35 years earlier, that they are going to be married and will shortly after move to Florida from the family home at the titular address in Port Washington, New York.
The obvious conclusion is that Mike and his new bride, Kitty, have some kind of history. Block is very insistent on making the point, both within the film and on the voiceover, calling attention, for example, to the song they choose for their first dance at the reception: "Only You" by the Platters. His toast to the bride and groom veers close to disrespectful and sarcastic, and is one of the quiet shocks that the picture delivers.
Both of Block's sisters express similar misgivings about the turn of events, at the same time sounding notes of caution for the effect it appears to have on their father. In fact, the difference is palpable. In the company of Mina in home video footage he often appears burdened down by great weights, taciturn and repressed and all too evidently making the best of things. With Kitty, he is more carefree, lighter and brighter, and clearly beginning to take baby steps toward opening emotionally.
The turning point for the film comes as the family home is being packed, when Mina's diary surfaces. It is a massive work—three boxes of notebooks and loose papers, a project begun in 1968. At first Block ponders whether he should read it, or indeed even keep it at all. These are understandable enough impulses, a kind of protecting of a loved one. But I found it enormously sad (no doubt for the obvious reasons) during the short period the decision was under consideration, one of the most affecting points of the whole thing. It's clear enough that the person writing wants to be known on some level—why else keep the notebooks and papers when they are decades old? To not look at it, or worse, to destroy it, just seems terribly sad to me.
In the end, Block chooses to read, and the revelations he finds are what turns everything on its head. There's nothing shocking or lurid or "gotcha" about what he discovers, just quiet truths about his mother and father and his parents' marriage that ring absolutely true to the way people live and organize their practical and emotional lives. It's Chekhov with the lid torn off, the interior view of a life of desperation and self-centeredness and pathos, one lived fully within the context of its times in the late '60s and '70s and beyond.
Block does not necessarily employ a light touch in working with this material and the expectations he knows viewers will bring to it, but he's fair to everyone involved and to himself as well. He doesn't look good making that wedding toast. And on a second time through I noticed how often Mike was shown offering his filmmaker son various things, with Block simply turning him down flat and not once acknowledging the impulse to generosity on the part of his father. Block is thus even more willing than anyone else to condemn himself for his own behavior, which contributes to lending the whole thing even more credibility.
It's an amazing and intimate portrait of a family dealing with grief and even more importantly with the lifelong struggles that most of us face and few of us admit to one another except in rare moments of extremity or honesty or both. In the meta-documentary in the DVD extras on the aftermath of 51 Birch Street within the Block family, which is an essential adjunct to this short documentary, Kitty particularly emerges as a kind of hero and healing angel for this family, never more so poignantly than in the plainspoken way that she pronounces "beautiful" as "beauty full," which only underlines the sense of what she is saying.
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