The Grief of Others

Patrick Wang follows up his acclaimed debut feature In the Family (2011) with an adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen’s novel The Grief of Others (also from 2011). The story centers on a young family in upstate New York suffering from a recent loss. At first they seem like a fairly functional group—they have meals together, the parents have good jobs, and the older daughter from the father’s previous relationship is welcomed into their home. But clearly something is not right. Each family member experiences the loss differently, and their inability to communicate effectively with each other is slowly pulling them apart. 

Wang’s intentionally minimalist, somewhat fragmented approach to this story doles out information sparingly. He’s much more interested in leaving an audience with lingering feelings and impressions than in providing a clear understanding of all that’s transpired. Individual scenes are well conceived; we often forget about the larger story and become wrapped up in what’s going on internally for whichever characters are on screen at the time. Wang’s background in live theater comes through loud and clear, not only in the way he gives his actors room to work but also in the interests of the various protagonists—the father is a set designer, the son is an illustrator, and the teenage daughter takes a strong interest in a set of unpretentiously composed dioramas made by the late father of a neighbor. Interestingly, the neighbor is the one main character who’s not a family relation of any kind, but his perspective on things seems no more of an “outsider’s” than anyone else’s.

The cast is strong across the board—including impressive turns by the child actors, Jeremy Shinder and Oona Laurence—but the deliberately understated quality of the overall picture prevents us from getting fully absorbed in the drama. Wang and cinematographer Frank Barrera draw attention to the movie’s low-budget aesthetic—the film was shot in just two weeks, in 16mm, on sparse sets with long static takes, a bland color pallet, and almost no musical underscore. The style is a bit too self-consciously spare, but it keeps us focused on the characters and aligned with the entire ensemble, even though the film occasionally places us in the point of view or memory of a specific individual. These shifts in perspective, and breaks in the story’s linear progression, jar the viewer and challenge the generic way narrative is typically imparted in movies. Though the presentational choices may not always work, but they collectively invite questions and interpretations that probably wouldn’t occur to us with a more traditional melodramatic treatment of the same subject matter.