#patrick wang

A Bread Factory, Part Two(2018) dir. Patrick Wang

A Bread Factory, Part One: For the Sake of Gold (Patrick Wang), 2018

2019 saw the addition of a new film to the list of great movies about custody battles: Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Despite not prominently featuring dragons, serial killers, or space wizards from a galaxy far, far away, the film became the toast of social media and the bane of overworked content creators the internet over who chugged out think piece after think piece squabbling over its place in the pantheon of court movies. Of all the films dredged up for listicle duty (thank you for your service Kramer vs. Kramer), one of the most surprising omissions was Patrick Wang’s 2011 indie drama In the Family, a superb, Spirit Award-nominated film about a gay man named Joey who finds himself trapped in a custody battle after his long-time boyfriend Cody dies in a car accident, leaving his biological son Chip from his previous marriage in a state of legal limbo. When Cody’s extended family invites Chip over for Thanksgiving, they de facto kidnap him and serve Joey with a restraining order, claiming custody as per an outdated but still legally binding will Cody wrote years before meeting Joey. Faced with an unwinnable court case—the film is set in a pre-Obergefell v. Hodges Texas—he descends into a pitch blackness that sees him reevaluate his entire life. At almost three hours, the film is a slow but absorbing sit where Wang assembles scenes and moments together with the assuredness of a filmmaker far beyond his years and experience (though he’d long worked in theater, this was, astonishingly, his directorial debut). His directing is an odd mixture of Yasujirō Ozu and Robert Altman, favoring the static camera and narrative ellipses of the former (we don’t hear about or see Cody die nor do we see his funeral) and the decentralized, character-based drama of the latter where actors wander in and out of shots and scenes seemingly as they please. Indeed, the average scene plays out for almost a minute before it “gets to the point.” While the whole film is a humanist triumph, the last hour is the most powerful, comprised largely of a Hail Mary custody deposition where Joey (played by a wonderfully understated Wang) pleads his case before Chip’s family while suffering homophobic attacks from their lawyer. As with the rest of the film, its intimacy is almost painful, and all without memeable Driver/Johansson histrionics. 

A Bread Factory, Part Two(2018) dir. Patrick Wang

A Bread Factory, Part One(2018) dir. Patrick Wang

Since his 2011 directorial debut In the Family, Patrick Wang has seemingly molded himself into America’s response to Taiwan's Edward Yang with his focus on slow-burning humanist parables set amidst familial and societal upheaval starring huge, multi-generational casts. In the Family, a heart-breaking look at a gay widow trapped in a hopeless custody battle for his dead partner's biological son, raised eyebrows for its three-hour length and languorous pacing, both audacious decisions that rarely bode well for first time directors coming from the theater. Indeed, the first fifteen minutes simply watch the central family putter about their business in the course of a single day from sunrise to sundown. Likewise, his two-part 2018 film A Bread Factory about a struggling community arts space in upstate New York stretched over four hours with much of the run-time devoted to simply watching actors and artists rehearse and perform. Though superficially concerned with the intricacies of human emotion, Wang is equally fascinated with observing the passing of time, and understandably, he needs a lot of it. Perhaps this speaks to why his second film The Grief of Others is such a disappointment. The only one of his films adapted from existing source material—in this case Leah Hager Cohen's 2011 novel—The Grief of Others feels disoriented by its 102-minute runtime, feeling rushed and incomplete. The film follows a traditional nuclear family living in Nyack, New York trapped in a maelstrom of unspoken grief after mother Ricky (Wendy Moniz) gives birth to an anencephalic baby that dies shortly after it's born. The usual pain of losing a child gets compounded when her husband John (Trevor St. John) discovers that she knew the baby was braindead in the womb months before giving birth and refused to tell him that it was doomed. This feels like prime material for Wang whose films all deal with loss in some way, but his inexplicable nonlinear execution here is oddly stunted; we don't even learn the family was recovering from a stillborn baby until almost halfway through. Instead, we get seemingly unrelated character vignettes that start and go nowhere, primarily concerning the red herring arrival of John's pregnant teenage daughter from another marriage which dominates the first half hour. Wang spends much of the film flailing for a direction or emotional center for his story and comes away confused and empty.