Memory, for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)

Memory, for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)

Alan King’s documentary about a Jewish retirement home in Toronto beautifully illustrates the adage that destiny is character. That it does so in the context of a fate shared by most of us who survive to senescence--marginalization in a world in which we serve no further purpose--makes that insight all the more poignant.

An array of pre- and quasi-scientific discourses has accounted for human character, with varying degrees of perspicacity. With every disposition resembling a set of unexamined prejudices, an interpretive strategy wearing the mask of self-evidence--the sheer variety occasions wonder. Each claims singularity, but in life as in art the collective range of individual difference readily reduces to a cast of repeating characters. King's documentary captures this compendium of coping strategies at their closing days and hours. 

The intersection of proclivities, afflictions, and fixations, a single life does not suffice to develop its myriad possibilities, nor exorcise the ghosts that haunt it. Yet each of us, in our terminal stage, is called to offer summation of a game rigged form the start. It's never obvious what is in and what out of our hands, but everyone has a play on the ball speeding toward them like a freight train. 
 

The room of every Baycrest resident sports a wall of memorabilia--remnants of irreducibly individual lives reduced to a curated display. An afterlife of sorts is already underway, with each guest showing as much as they can fit of the distinctions that accrued to what must now be reckoned the lost cause their lives. Portraits, certificates, and trophies attesting mastery and successful integration. Their self-substantiation as citizens a fait accompli, each prepares to become the same stranger to their public self as when first embarking on life's journey--unburdened or bereft, as temperament decrees. 

A yawning indifference towards the guarantors of identity haunts Baycrest's halls, where people of not altogether sound mind lounge about awaiting the inevitable. As memory and family ties attenuate, the fabric of formerly autonomous selves frays to reveal a delicate yet still distinctive weave.

Diminutive Max Trachter shuffles about in suit and fedora like an old vaudevillian, a brow raised in perpetual bemusement. His bewildered innocence may be an inch thick, but it disarms all comers. Blithely unaware of the magnitude of his situation, he laughs up his sleeve at a joke no one else seems in on. When it's revealed that he never married we can't help wondering if bachelorhood was the key to his surreal self-enchantment.

 

Robust and deep-throated Claire Mandell is the resident voice of reason. She enjoys the authority a sense of responsibility brings, in her own estimation and that of the community. Comfortable in her skin, she requires no one's permission to be who she is. For all her earnestness, her enchantment with Max inspires genuine silliness. She strokes his cheeks and showers him with kisses; new-born with every encounter. “Oy, oy, oy,” they chant, dancing about in second childhood. The dearest thing in her world--Max is the blessing reserved the righteous. 

At ninety-three Fay Silverman periodically breaks into tears as she peers out a window like some lost school girl. Everything in her life has diminished except her expectations. “I wish my son would come,” she confides with weary emphasis. “I’m so lonely...I wish I was dead.” Now dejected, now beside herself with glee, she wears her emotions on her sleeve, lamenting, exulting, and railing away. Theatrics that once moved mountains now only raise eyebrows.

She waves impishly from across the hall in a game of virtual peekaboo, making reference to a new boyfriend downstairs. “I like men!” she exclaims with defiant resignation. An instant later she's turned inward, riveted by a sense of abandonment. When her son brings a watch from China her amazement knows no bounds. “I’m so excited!...I can’t help crying!” Maybe she just enjoys shedding tears, her daughter-in-law dryly suggests. In her gentle, maudlin volatility Fay is as out-of-place at Baycrest as her antiquated Christian name.

When not despairing she puts the bravest face she can on her situation. “I'm still here because I said I want to be here. I’m a strong woman. I don’t give up.” In the fullest sense one only gives up once, of course. But Fay means something else: that to live is to look-forward. To expect gifts, if not miracles. 

“I’ve been happy my whole life. As bad as it was...” she affirms in closing judgment. Thereafter she disappears from the documentary, leaving us to wonder not if but under what circumstances she passed from the world of the expectant. Protesting to the end, no doubt.  

Of all the characters in King's documentary Fay--in her credulousness vis-à-vis her own affective indications of reality--comes closest to embodying Sartre's verdict that man is a "useless passion." A being who begins and ends in the same want of purpose. Unless it be simply--to go on existing.

Ida Orliff, a retired nurse and doctor’s assistant, had a blessed life. She considers herself lucky to have positive memories. Her one regret is not having anything to keep her occupied. “Life is funny,” she muses, preternaturally cheerful--"but the last years are not good.” As if asking for permission to be candid, reluctant to draw definitive conclusions whose weight barely registers, she appends words of grateful gladness with a convivial smirk. She knows the world will go on in all its crazy glory and does not presume to speak for the dead. Life is all there is. Even in the ending. Diminished, yet still ardent. 

Certifiable Helen rants in toothless, free-associating dementia to the annoyance of her cohabitants. “What kind of a home did she come from?” Ida inquires disapprovingly. Helen doesn't recognize her own daughter, who continues to visit, resigned to being just an acquaintance. At times acutely cognizant of her surroundings, Helen's not above deflating an unusually up-beat Fay with questions about her son’s whereabouts. Habits of the heart--the malicious no less than the life-affirming--defy the infirmities of age.

The day comes when the news of Max’s passing must be broken. Residents and staff members gather in support. The favorite of Fortune, little Max had a fall, was hospitalized, and promptly gave up the ghost. Cradling her head in her hands Claire remains incredulous, roundly defeated by the necessity of grasping the imponderable. “Where was I? Why wasn’t I told?” 

Try as she might, there's no sense to be found in his sudden exit. Her perplexity channels itself in queries about the circumstances of his death; interrogating the mundane markers of time and place in an attempt to dissipate the inconceivability of his demise. As if fixing the chain of events leading to obliteration would refute the remorseless fallacy of natural consequences.

What remains of life will go on in a profoundly diminished capacity. “I’ll never get over this,” she prophesies. 

Lingering in her mind may be the sense that death is punishment for the violent presumption of birth. In the ensuing days she has repeatedly to be told of a disappearance she keeps forgetting. Each time it’s broken the news is a revelation. One night she dreams about it.

“I dreamed he passed away. Does that mean anything?” 

“I think it does, Claire. Max has passed away.” 

“What? When?”

“Five days ago.”

“Five days ago? I just had that dream last night...Why didn’t you tell me before...?”

Claire struggles to make a connection that seems to require a leap of faith. “... I’m not dreaming now,” she insists, as if to reassure herself. 

Thus do perception and reality diverge as life approaches in-difference, never having revealed the seam of its unmendable rift. 

“He was the captain of his ship of soul,” the Rabbi announces at a make-shift service in the lounge. He celebrates Max's friendship with Claire, who sits dabbing a handkerchief in her sunken eyes, exhausted from weeping. Ida, comfortingly folding her hand over Clair's, looks on respectfully. The Rabbi concludes with the standard appeal:

“May his soul be bound up in the bond of life.” 

Given the enormity of the change death effects, the request seems modest. Fittingly for a religion that sees pride--the forgetting of one's origin--as the basic sin, and salvation as a collective transformation. Yet in bridging the breach opened by death, the plea to be resumed in life's bond performs the essential work of all eulogies--pledging continuity on behalf of the discontinued.