Prodigal Sons

Prodigal Sons

86 Minutes








It's always a shame when a good story doesn't make a good film; it's even more so when the story is a family's troubled history and the film is a documentary by one of them. Prodigal Sons follows director Kimberly Reed and brother Marc McKerrow and their lifelong troubles with one another, using home footage, handheld cameras and even archival films to trace their complicated relations. See, Marc was adopted to the McKerrows as an infant and only after a severe injury (and several surgeries, including removal of part of the brain) as well as sporadic personality changes, is discovered to be the grandchild of film legends Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. And as though that weren't material enough, Kimberly was once Paul McKerrow, having undergone gender-reassignment and estrangement from her older brother for nearly a decade.

Prodigal Sons largely follows Kimberly and Marc as she returns to their Montana home for the first time in years to attend their high school reunion, and their continual attempts to reconnect and reconcile. Stretching over the course of nearly a year, the footage shot shows them both bonding, violently arguing, traveling to Croatia to visit Welles' surviving partner, Oja Kodar and ultimately seemingly come to terms being different people. Their sibling rivalries are not remarkable in some aspects; as the oldest sibling and an adoptive child, Marc speaks frequently of feeling both threatened and shunted aside by the younger children (their brother Todd also appears in the film). Conversely, Kimberly seems to still contain residual fear of her brother's early aggressiveness and guilt over her own prominence as a high school athlete over him.

But unfortunately, closeness to the subject at hand does not seem to have done the director any favors. Most damningly, her usage of shaky, handheld footage seems to strive for a sense of immediacy but throws her subjects into a near-constant state of stiltedness. Nearly everyone seems constantly aware of being on camera, and thus their reactions seem stiff, tending towards flat statements on the importance of whatever event has just been filmed. Combined with Kimberly's overly dramatic narration, the effect is simply too affected to come off as powerful as it should. The few moments that feel completely natural are, unfortunately, scenes of Marc's shifts into rage and violence, capturing the horrifying descent into irrationality that can take over the mentally ill; these scenes are both terrifying and unpleasant to watch, particularly when he begins spouting homophobic rhetoric at his own family, but they appear more revelatory than much of the rest of the film.

Marc certainly doesn't come off well; obsessed with his past as a popular high school party boy and justifying nearly any action or statement through his condition (which must certainly play a part), the man filmed seems conflicted by both his own nature and how he wants to appear to others. While Kimberly actively seeks to eradicate her past as a way full embrace her new life and identity, Marc clings to his, seemingly less interested in his famed grandfather's fame than in simply having an idea of where he came from.

Prodigal Sons is as disappointing as the story behind it is intriguing. But the use of heavy-handed footage of Welles- shots so obviously constructed for symbolic value as to invalidate the veracity of the rest of the home footage- and simple clumsiness in storytelling mar the chances of a viewer getting anything beyond a tale of stranger than usual rivalries.

by Nathan Kamal