At its heart, and there is a great heart to be discovered here, Morgan Dews' documentary "Must Read After My Death" is a searing and intimate account of an unconventional woman struggling not to lose her identity or her sanity in the rigid 1950s suburban world of stay-at-home moms, well-behaved children and sparkling-clean houses.
It is a family seen through the prism of Allis, Dews' grandmother, not the one he knew growing up but the one he discovered in the more than 200 hours of home movies, 50 hours of tapes and 300 pages of transcripts in a file labeled "Must Read After My Death."
This is Dews' first feature-length film, and he has done exceedingly well distilling all those pages and hours into a story so compelling and so taut in its construction that it is virtually impossible to look away; the images on-screen sit in almost complete opposition to the story we hear.
Though there are other voices, Allis' is by far the most powerful. "I love my children and I want to be a good mother, but I'm not one to sit at home and paint and sew." "I'm not a housewife, I've never been a housewife." "I told Charley I wanted to have his children whether he married me or not." "I've got to find something I can be successful at." "Do I have the right to take time from the family to do anything?"
Her words begin to feel like dispatches from the feminist front lines and get darker as the years go by and the family deconstructs: Anne, the oldest, marrying at 17 in part to escape the family's escalating fights; Bruce sent to a psychiatric institute for a time; Chuck, an undiagnosed dyslexic, struggling to learn; Douglas, the youngest, unhappy and failing; Charley's anger rising; Allis' anxiety escalating -- most of them spending hours in therapy each week. And through it all, there is Allis' questioning -- of herself, their lives, their choices and all that has gone wrong.
The hours of self-examination as she searches for some truth in her life are infused with issues that sound familiar today: finding one's place in the world at large, grappling with the expectations of society. She is torn between a desire for independence and her love for her children, arguing passionately that nonconformity is not a destructive force.
