Embracing Parents’ Pain

It’s been called the wound that never completely heals, which may explain why society in general and Hollywood in particular have been loath to deal with the subject.

Now, in a sudden burst, there are four films about parents confronting the sudden death of a child.

The most recent arrival is last year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, “The Son’s Room.” The film, which opened Friday, is directed by and stars Italy’s Nanni Moretti as a psychologist struggling to cope with the accidental death of his teenage son. The widely acclaimed “In the Bedroom” stars Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson as parents emotionally ravaged by their son’s murder. “Monster’s Ball” throws polar-opposite characters Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry together after the deaths of their respective sons. The Australian ensemble drama “Lantana” features Barbara Hershey as a psychologist who becomes estranged from her husband (Geoffrey Rush) after the murder of their daughter.

Michael Durfee, a child psychiatrist with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, applauds the current crop of films that use the framework of a child’s loss to examine the effects on the family, with all the guilt, blame and other complex emotions that inevitably arise. He likens the breakthrough to the decades it took to bring the problem of child abuse into the open. Now, perhaps, this more private battle will finally receive due attention as well, he says.

“The thing that amazes me is that there are four movies dealing thematically with this same subject, something that couldn’t have happened 10 years ago. It would have driven audiences away,” Durfee says. “And interestingly, it doesn’t take over the whole story but rather is used to explore characters’ various levels of pain.”

In the past, there has been only a handful of movies dealing with the after-effects of the loss of a child as the central subject of the film. Only a few have met with mainstream acceptance, including 1980’s Oscar-winning “Ordinary People,” with Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton, and the 1988 adaptation of Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist,” starring William Hurt.

Other notable examples include George Cukor’s 1949 drama “Edward, My Son,” starring Deborah Kerr and Spencer Tracy; Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller “Don’t Look Now”; the revenge dramas “An Eye for an Eye” (1996), starring Sally Field, and “The Crossing Guard” (1995), starring Jack Nicholson; and “The Stone Boy” (1984), with Robert Duvall and Glenn Close. Two Meryl Streep films from the ‘80s deal with the subject: “A Cry in the Dark” and “Sophie’s Choice.” In 1999, Sigourney Weaver played a woman whose friend’s child drowned while in her care in “A Map of the World.”

In Atom Egoyan’s 1997 “The Sweet Hereafter,” Ian Holm played an attorney who tried to persuade parents whose children had died in a school bus accident to hire him, although that movie was more about the lawyer and his troubled relationship with his own daughter than about parents coping with grief.

Audiences as well as critics are indeed responding to “In the Bedroom,” which has become a breakout art-house hit. “Monster’s Ball” and “Lantana” are also doing well in limited release (both expand to additional screens next month).

Like “The Son’s Room,” these other recent films carefully, methodically, examine the various stages of loss and largely avoid pat reactions or conclusions. Some characters are consumed by grief, and turn vengeful or self-destructive. Others succumb to numbness and self-recrimination. It’s only the characters who confront their pain and seek to share the burden with others who find any solace.

It’s precisely the head-on realism of these films that may be the key to their acceptance. “When death is presented as a spectacle, the audience is anesthetized,” Moretti says. “That’s because too often directors hit you in the gut with style. They don’t trust their audience. I insisted on dealing with the story realistically, without stylization. I wanted people to share the characters’ feelings, to go down that road with them together.”

Before “Monster’s Ball,” Swiss-born Marc Forster directed the drama “Everything Put Together,” about a mother who loses a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

His fascination with the subject of parental loss, he explains, lies “in how different people react to it since in Western society we celebrate birth, but we treat death as unnatural.”

When he was growing up, says Todd Field, American director of “In the Bedroom,” he certainly internalized that message. “The way I was raised, grief was a four-letter word. Talking about this subject was considered dirty, something which people judged one another about--they’re grieving too much, they’re not grieving enough. Also in the American mentality, we always talk about getting over things. But there are some things you can’t get over.

“At some point in your life, if you’re fortunate, you walk through a doorway [and move on], but you’re still missing something,” Field says. “If you lose your right arm, you never forget you don’t have a right arm anymore.”

Even in cultures where death is more easily incorporated into the fabric of life, this particular wound is paralyzing. “When a child loses his parents he’s called an orphan,” Moretti says. “But a parent losing a child is thought of as so unnatural, so unacceptable, so scandalous, that there isn’t even a word for it.”

The sentiments expressed in these films reflect the real-life reactions Linda Garcia encounters as manager of child development services at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. In educating parents on dealing with bereavement, Garcia says she has her work cut out for her. “It’s a real dilemma to get people to talk about death or even to use the word ‘die.’ It’s one of the biggest challenges I’ve run into in educating people about death, she says.

When the death involves a child, the effects are particularly devastating, often leading to a breakdown in communication among members of a family, asserts Ray Lawrence, director of “Lantana.” Ironically, the character played by Hershey is a therapist but doesn’t reach out, remaining isolated and overwhelmed by her sorrow. “It’s truly a case of ‘physician, heal thyself,’” he says. “The thing between Valerie [Hershey’s character] and John [Rush] is that they don’t share their grief. She grieves by writing a book about her daughter, and he does it by visiting the site where she was murdered. Grief can bring people together when they share it. But in this case, it pushes them apart.”

The breakdown in communication is only one facet of the effects experienced by Spacek and Wilkinson in “In the Bedroom.” “What’s so horrible when you go through the loss of a child is that it demolishes the unspoken covenant that parents will die before their children,” Field says. “We take a certain selfish comfort in that. And when it doesn’t happen, every possible weakness within yourself will surface. All the chinks in the marriage, all the things that have previously been traversed suddenly become insurmountable obstacles.”

The vulnerabilities that emerge in films such as “Lantana” and “In the Bedroom” include feelings of guilt, self-recrimination, paranoia and even the desire for revenge.

Many of these sensations are indicative of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is part of the grieving process, according to Deanne Tilton, executive director of the Los Angeles County Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, who finds this confluence of films particularly intriguing in the wake of the nation’s public mourning after Sept. 11. “We’re in the middle of witnessing profound grief, and perhaps that’s why these movies are resonating with us,” Tilton says.

The Sept. 11 attacks, in which thousands of parents lost children, gave rise to many of the same feelings. Even those who did not lose a loved one in the tragedy, experienced a sense of disorientation, which typifies the reactions of Moretti’s characters in “The Son’s Room.”

The husband, wife and their surviving daughter drift apart, dealing with their grief differently and separately. “I wanted to dispel the myth that pain and suffering always unites people,” he says.

Like the Hershey character in “Lantana,” Moretti’s protagonist is also a therapist. But, as Tilton points out, “being a therapist isn’t any insurance at all that you can deal with your own grief, especially since people who deal with others’ grief are used to giving help but have a hard time asking for it.”

“I wanted to show what happens to someone who, on a daily basis, sees others’ pain when he’s confronted with the worst pain one can have,” Moretti says.

While working on the script, Moretti confesses, he didn’t know what the film’s outcome would be. Unlike Hershey’s character, who tries to forge on, Moretti’s character does talk to a colleague and eventually makes a difficult decision in order to confront his grief. “It’s not a defeat, nor is it a victory,” he explains. “It’s simply a choice of awareness.”

In the end, dealing with his feelings and sharing them with his wife and daughter prove beneficial, although the film’s ending is ambiguous. So too is the resolution in “Monster’s Ball.” When Forster takes leave of his characters, their fate is open-ended. There can be no closure, he insists, because they are still in the early stages of the mourning process. “There is a numbness that sets in after the loss of a child, and it takes many months, even years, to realize what it meant to you or how you feel about it,” he says. “Only after a certain time goes by can you really grieve.”

Yet he offers a glimmer of hope in the burgeoning romance between two disparate people “who under normal circumstances would never end up together, but [through tragedy] find a way to relate to one another,” Forster says.

Garcia says she hopes these movies “give people permission to talk about and to deal with their own unresolved feelings of loss. The analogy I make is that we have a choice to walk through a shattered window pane, and feel the pain and anguish, or we walk around it, deny it. But sometime in your lifetime you’ll have to deal with that unresolved grief, or it will come back and haunt you.”

Field says his film has triggered precisely the kinds of responses Garcia addressed.

“At every screening I’ve attended since last January [when ‘In the Bedroom’ debuted at Sundance], at least one person has come up to me and taken me aside to tell me an intensely personal story. And it usually starts with ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you, but I can’t talk to anyone else about this.’”

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Richard Natale is a regular contributor to Calendar.