Southern gothic

FEW DON'T WANT to tell their life story to the camera these days; otherwise, Jerry, Montel, and Sally Jesse wouldn't still be in business. Still, while talk shows and pseudo-courtroom confessionals parade angry, freakish guests, there's deeper, scarier stuff to be mined from dysfunctional familydom. Accordingly, Ruth Leitman's 1998 documentary uses scratchy tones and low light to create a candid—if not unflattering—family album that's something like a cross between a Mary Karr memoir and the 1992 documentary Brother's Keeper.

ALMA
directed by Ruth Leitman runs February 23-March 8 at Grand Illusion

Alma is a 55-year-old fading Southern beauty and the mother of Margie, the film's producer, herself a spunky firecracker of a gal who heads a country-and-Western swing band and can party with the best of them. On the surface, Margie's a small-town girl escaping her "crazy" mother (who hears voices at the A & P and believes Elvis is Margie's dad) and reticent father Jim. ("Don't take a picture of my butt," he mumbles.) Yet once the family facade is scratched, it opens up a wound that won't stop bleeding. Alcoholism, infidelity, and physical abuse initially seem no big whoop—and indeed would probably get bumped off today's boob tube for something more salacious.

But there's more. "I know the dangers of molesting adults," says Alma, wearing stripes of rouge across her cheeks while holding court inside her rotting, cramped home. The significance of that comment is laid bare as Alma unfolds her story, which escalates from memories of her despised mother to more graphic evidence of familial nightmares that would send social service agencies running in with an arrest warrant.

Alma and Margie spin their tales with the durability and displacement of individuals who have realized their lot in life—a perverse combination of duty and resignation that makes Alma compelling even in its more lurid, squirm-inducing moments.

Somehow they manage to laugh straight in the face of their lesser misfortunes (like the time Jim went to the bathroom in the driveway). It's clear, however, that laughter is Margie's coping mechanism to deal with the darker undercurrents running steadily through her mother's mind: narcissistic psychosis aggravated by diabetes, religious fervor, hypersexuality, and who knows what else.

What finally emerges in Alma is a compound portrait of a woman—mother and daughter almost becoming one, bound with the ties that only families will endure—painted with hues of abuse and mental illness.

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