MOVIE REVIEW : Fred G. Sullivan’s Handmade ‘Pavilion’

The citation won by the cheerfully handmade “Sullivan’s Pavilion” (AMC Century 14) at this year’s United States Film Festival says it all: Its special recognition was for “originality, independent spirit, and for doing it his own damn way.”

Sullivan is 41-year-old Fred G, father of four under 6, husband to the unflappable Polly; a seemingly obsessive film maker who lives in what looks (to Western eyes) like paradise in the Adirondacks and has made a warm meditation on the twin pulls of family life and moviemaking--sort of a docudiaper. (It’s a Times-rated Family picture if ever there was one.)

Two quotations seem to be its lodestars, one by Bunuel: “Deep down inside, we all have a penchant for chaos.” The second line, from movie maker Robert Downey, is quoted by the gentian-eyed Polly Sullivan: What every movie maker needs is “a good old lady--or it’s impossible.”

Fred G. seems to know that he has one of the best old ladies possible, an ex-Philadelphia mainline debutante who saw the beer belly and the puppy fat on Boston University film student Fred, then looked a little beyond it and married him anyway.

This film, which is controlled, scripted--it says--chaos, lets Sullivan take on the alter ego of Adirondack Fred, a man with a flair for letting it all hang out in a deerskin loincloth, while carrying film cans up a granite mountain face. Very, very heavy symbolism.

It is part of Sullivan’s take on Sullivan, an 83-minute odyssey which begins with tongue-in-cheek autobiography and finishes among the doldrums and delights of family life, while the Big Question--do I really have it to be a film maker?--seems to recede further and further in the distance.

Sullivan is successful in the main. The best sections are the home-based observations, shown in one hilarious sequence of pixilation: child rearing seen as the day-by-day, hand-to-hand combat that it can be.

Some of the invented characters, like Conrad P. Drizzle, the prissy film expert, or the alluring vixen who rises from the film maker’s daydreams to haunt him, are sophomoric or worse. But the Russian bear, who may be Chekhovian but speaks a pretty authentic-sounding Russian and who forces Adirondack Fred to face facts, is a nice invention. The bear--and, I suspect, the audience--is pro-Polly. “She, not you, knows love,” it observes. “ You know fantasy.”

Most of Fred G’s fantasy goes down smoothly, graced by the pure sweetness of his children, the stubborn, intelligent endurance of Polly, and by the plain, gritty tenacity of Fred himself. You have to admire a man who, down to his last $24, with his first feature (the locally shot “Cold River”) a $1.2 million loss, turned not to lumberjacking or carpentry to feed his kids, but back to his camera, to make the film we have here. So if there are moments when Sullivan uses his kids disengenuously, “Daddy wouldn’t tell you this,” Tate confides to us, “but one of the twins’s been sick a lot,” or when he piles on one poop joke too many, the love that emanates from the rest of the film may let you forgive a lot.