51 BIRCH STREET

by Kevin Koehler

Doug Block begins his awful documentary, 51 Birch Street, by introducing Mom and Dad.  "This happy-looking couple is Mike and Mina Block," he says.  "There's not rich.  They're not famous.  And while they're not exactly ordinary, they're hardly people you'd think of making a documentary about.  Even if you were their son and even if making documentary is what you do."  You can be pardoned for thinking the film that follows is about his parents or that Doug Block, having announced himself as a documentarian, would demonstrate any real aptitude for documentary filmmaking.  The audience hasn't been intentionally misled in regards to subject; on the contrary, Block believes 51 Birch Street is an examination of his parents, their hidden relationship(s), their secrets.  However, with typical Baby Boomer narcicissism, what the picture's really about is Block himself and his feelings: what it means to him to make the earthshattering discovery that his parents had an imperfect life together.  That their fifty-four-year partnership was not filled exclusively with rainbows, puppy dogs, and ice cream.  You see, as hard as it may be to fathom, Mike and Mina Block, parents of maker-of-documentaries Doug Block, had problems.

While most of us begin viewing our parents as three-dimensional human beings with their own foibles quite early in life, Doug has managed to put off such heady realizations until the sudden death of his mother following a three week bout with pneumonia.  "I can't even begin to comprehend it," says Doug.  "But soon, life moves on as if nothing's changed."  Except, things do change, and a little too quickly to everyone's liking.  After a mourning period deemed too brief (three months, admittedly a quick turn-around), Dad is remarried to one of his former secretaries, a woman named Kitty with whom it was presumed he'd lost touch decades earlier.  Doug serves as best man for this occasion, which he claims "is not a day for personal opinions" before announcing, in his toast, that his deceased mother would find the rush nuptials "a little bit crazy."

A short aside: Doug's duties at the wedding also included wedding videographer, a job he does sometimes to finance documentaries like 51 Birch Street.  It affords him, in his own opinion, remarkable insight into the future lives of others.  "There's some couples I know are just going to be there together forever.  They're like, so solid.  There are others I go 'Man, this isn't going to last a year.  What are they getting married for?'"  Yes, Doug Block divines these truths by shooting your wedding with his camera.

Moving on...

Dad's remarriage comes as quite a shock to everyone.  Besides it being an "insult" to Mom, Mike Block committed that unpardonable Boomer offense of being quiet and undemonstrative (or as they would put it, "uncommunicative").  "Dad's not a very sharing person about himself," says one of his daughters.  "He doesn't talk about his childhood.  He doesn't talk about his feelings.  He doesn't talk about himself."  It's seen as a personal affront to his children (what sociopath doesn't like to talk about himself?), in the same way that Dad, rather them call them by name, would whistle when their presence was required ("like dogs" says one sister).  Doug asks whether he ever knew his father, this stranger with the temerity to embark on a new life, sell the family home, and move to Florida (like no one in New York never does).  Son turns the camera on his own wife, Marjorie, soliciting her opinion: "Do you think there's something I haven't resolved with him yet?"  Yes, but she doesn't know what it is.  "I suppose if one goes through psychoanalysis - you know, real psychoanalysis, going four times a week for years - maybe you resolve everything with your parents."  While his father is focused squarely on the future, "I'm still stuck in the past."  And that's what is really important, isn't it?

Rather than go to psychoanalysis four times a week for years, Doug decided to make 51 Birch Street, read thirty years of his dead mother's diary, and share with us what he'd learned.  Among other existential crisis-provoking revelations, Mom probably had a brief affair.  She developed deep affection for her therapist.  She was unhappy (except when she wasn't).  She liked sex.  Not that any of this really matters outside filmmaker Block's own solipsistic interpretation of it, made through the prism of his own feelings.  The very word becomes something akin to a mantra; one emblematic sequence follows Doug as he visits the author of a self-help book to discuss them.  The whole exercise is maddening (the psychiatrist uses the loss of Doug's mother as an opportunity to make it about his own experience losing a parent), typical of a deeply self-indulgent picture that exemplifies the worst, navel-gazing preoccupations of so many contemporary documentarians: those who make themselves as the subject of their trite little films.  Trust me - you're not that interesting.

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