Another American Family, Verite

No wonder the CBS Sports camera attached itself to Jennifer Capriati the other day and sucked on her public pain like a leech as the young tennis pro with a troubled past broke down and cried when meeting reporters after losing at the U.S. Open.

Much of television, including even talk shows and so-called “reality” programs, is such tightly choreographed faux life that the medium constantly searches for that Holy Grail of moments it can advertise as true spontaneity, however unsettling.

Thus, Capriati, for we’re a nation of closet Peeping Toms who gravitate to keyholes provided by media.

That’s how it began, too, with the seven Louds of Santa Barbara at a time when the tidal wave of “reality” series was still years away. The Louds willingly became filmmaker Craig Gilbert’s TV specimen under a scope in “An American Family,” a 12-hour documentary on them that first ran on PBS in 1973 and captured not only the daily routine of their affluent lives but also, incredibly, the rupture of a marriage.

Then came the debate over whether Gilbert and his associates had objectively witnessed events in these lives or, as divorced Bill and Pat Loud later claimed, distorted them on the screen and helped shape them off the screen. So noisy was the debate that Albert Brooks satirized “An American Family” in his movie “Real Life,” having his story’s manipulative director so desperate for action at one point that he turns the wife’s visit to a gynecologist into an expose of the doctor.

Now comes another ambitious PBS documentary’s attempt to intimately define the oft-maligned family unit that remains at once the bedrock of U.S. society and, thanks to sitcoms and melodramas, the most trivialized institution on TV.

It’s the five-night “An American Love Story,” the title alone distancing it from that earlier captivating downer, “An American Family,” which was spelled for viewers in blocks of granite that slowly developed hairline cracks and began to crumble.

Even though family members are the story, race and racism are the simmering, volatile subtext of “An American Love Story.” Yet these characters from real life seem able to take in reasonable stride and sometimes even laugh about the demons of prejudice that continue to shadow them.

And when the series concludes its wondrous and revealing 10-hour journey, the marriage of middle-class, middle-aged interracial couple Bill Sims and Karen Wilson appears as strong and impenetrable as ever. As does their bond with their daughters, Cicily and Chaney.

Viewers should have no trouble bonding with all of them, nor seeing their solidarity as a unit and survival--against tough odds--as a comforting affirmation of families.No one will be satirizing this documentary about parents and progeny uniting, at times under duress.

Bill is a tall, African American blues singer and musician who wears his hair here in a short ponytail, Karen a diminutive white woman who likes broad-brimmed hats and has a corporate job at a desk in front of a computer. They met and fell perilously in love in small-town Ohio in 1967, where cops harassed Bill, and some of the white locals who shunned the couple once had been Karen’s closest friends. Bill and Karen were married a dozen years later, when Cicily was 6, and for some time now they’ve been New Yorkers.

As the series opens they’re living in a comfortable Queens apartment with their daughters. When we meet the youngest, Chaney, she is 12, and Cicily is just starting at “almost Ivy” Colgate University, where she will be the only black in a white sorority whose members the family playfully title the “Stepford Wives.” Cicily repeatedly expresses her dislike of Colgate, whose student body she describes as being just 3% black. But she sticks it out, and later in the series graduates with a religion degree.

This appealing foursome arrives on PBS courtesy of filmmaker Jennifer Fox, who interviewed them for years before hanging out with them with her camera for 18 months starting in 1992. Although sometimes profound, the results on the screen also affirm how fascinating it can be watching even the most mundane normalities of life that we take for granted.

The presence of a TV lens inevitably alters behavior on some level. Yet go figure, for the voyeur in you is tapped when Bill is doing something as routine as whipping up some eggs for breakfast. Or when Karen puts on her makeup. Or when she and Cicily shop for groceries. Or when one of the family speaks on the phone. Or when Bill, with no trace of being self-conscious, slips a pint of whiskey into his traveling bag as evidence of his alcoholism that he and the exasperated Karen at times speak candidly about. This, despite Fox, in an unusually gracious move for a documentarian, granting the family final cut on her footage of them.

Although she also chronicles the inevitable crises that flash unexpectedly, such as Karen’s health problems that surface Sunday night and later require a hysterectomy, viewers expecting fireworks will be disappointed. This is not the suburban Louds, with an angry wife ejecting her husband from the house, and a gay son jolting his parents when bursting from the closet like Superman from a phone booth.

With the Louds, also, what you saw after editing was almost entirely what you got. There were no off-screen voices to interpret or elaborate, in contrast to the cinema verite-lite of “An American Love Story,” whose pictures coexist with Fox’s interviews (“Was it ever hard for you guys ‘cause you don’t look alike?” she asks Karen and Cicily) and voice-over footnotes from the family and others. At times they come across either as intrusive or vague.

Yet with all of its storytelling blemishes and its unhurried evolution across these five nights, “An American Love Story” is still enormously seductive at all times (and smoky, given the continual cigarette action of Bill, Karen and Cicily). It’s also especially powerful when speaking blunt truths about racial feelings that attain a level of honesty rare for TV documentaries.

That includes the light-skinned Cicily finding herself in limbo between white and black cultures. In Part 2, she spends a semester with other U.S. students in Nigeria, and her subsequent description of an angry seating squabble among black and white collegians on a bus trip there becomes a disturbing metaphor for race relations.

As is the final hour, when Karen and Bill relive old anxieties while attending her 25th high school reunion. Earlier in the series, Bill reopens some more of his life’s baggage in a return to his hometown of Marion, Ohio, where his parents, brother and adult son and daughter from a previous relationship live.

Most memorable hands down, though, is a scene coming midway through the series, one documenting a moment that families everywhere will appreciate. It’s a happy one with tensions and sharp words between Chaney and her parents over her first date fading away when, after a big buildup, her eighth-grade suitor is finally outside the door. Ba-Boom! He enters nervously, to be greeted by Fox’s camera, Chaney and Karen, who lists some geographical boundaries and informs the couple how long (about 90 minutes) they can stay out.

You can’t quite put your finger on why it’s so wonderful. All you know is that this time, instead of gawking, you are watching something innocent and universal that’s important to cherish.

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* “An American Love Story” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on KCET and KVCR and continues through Thursday at 9 each night. Additional information about interracial relationships available at: https://www.pbs.org/lovestories.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.