51 Birch Street

This movie is really, really good. Despite the fact that the music is kind of cloyingly bad, and it's very few interesting shots, and the way it's edited is quite often just as cloyingly sentimental as the music (wait a minute... what does cloyingly even mean? I totally am just using that word because I've seen it used in that exact way as a criticism for other things... whatever...), something about the movie works. Lots of the reviews discuss how incredible it is that the movie gets so much mileage of what is, really, a pretty average story. It's quite incredible that Block's parents stayed together for fifty years, but it's certainly not that out of the ordinary--at least not for people of their generation. Ultimately, I think what gives the movie it's profound emotional heft is that it really is a chronicle of Doug Block setting out to make a real connection with a person (his father) who's always been closed off to him--and succeeding rather remarkably. By the end of the movie, you can sense just how well he's managed to get to know both of his parents, and how he's managed to come to actually understand very deeply these two other human beings. It's not really the story of the marriage of his parents and how they made it work or even his father's largesse that is so satisfying, it's the very genuine connection the he makes with his father (and, I think, even though she's no longer alive, so certainly in a different way but still it's there, with his mother) that leaves you feeling you've just witnessed something pretty profound.