Peanut Gallery (2015)
Filmmaker Molly Gandour, in her mid-20s, returns to her childhood home in Indiana to speak with her parents in depth for the first time about her sister's death from cancer sixteen years earlier. The filmmaker comes of age as she weaves a deeply observed portrait of a family unearthing a long ago loss. Unflinching and poignant, Peanut Gallery shows us how we can transform when we begin to fill the silences between those closest to us.
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A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.
Molly Gandour's documentary is beautiful, honest, and admirable. It imparts useful insight on the healing process and family dynamics without any hint of complacency. The sheer labor involved, the amount of footage the filmmaker must have looked through, the difficulty of working with family (however willing), dealing with the weight/unreliability/warping of memory, the time she had to spend deconstructing her collective pain to make something communicable to an outsider... It's very hard to make something so elegant and concise. It's structured yet evocative and introspective (there's space between the events, space between the scenes one can feel). I was captivated the whole time. A first film with universal value. Very, very impressive.