2/31: In A Town This Size
Screen: Cat On The Wall Productions
Patrick V. Brown’s combination film and testimony, In A Town This Size, is shot short and plain.
The stock is video. A score doesn’t make itself known until a good half an hour in. Sometimes the camera isn’t focused; at all times the light is blasted. Occasionally Brown includes a cutaway to himself, say, taking fakely studious notes while speaking to an attorney on-camera, or nodding when an interviewee who’s chosen to speak in shadow is talking. It’s as though Brown watched Rushmore and thought to himself, if Max Fischer can do it…
But Brown didn’t make In A Town This Size just to make a picture. He made it because his pediatrician, Bill Dougherty, molested not only him but a good number of his peers in the small Oklahoma town of Bartlesville in the ’60s and ’70s. Brown interviews a few of them, and then his own parents, and then another parent who found out long after the fact that Dougherty had gone after three of his six children, and the matter-of-factness of their reporting fits with the absolute-minimum aesthetic of the movie; when victims say things like, “He told me one time he did such a great job on my circumcision,” with only the faintest fillip of tone, why underline it with a tricksy frame or a disgusted violin?
Whether it’s the father who gets emotional about not having seen what was happening “because I was so stupid” or Brown neutrally asking his parents when they realized he was telling the truth about “Dr. Bill,” the material is not easy, but IATTS‘s determination to avoid overwrought filmmaking or implying a doomy permanence to what happened to these children is smart, and more respectful somehow than the pearl-clutching we’ve gotten used to from SVU and its ilk. The breadth of Dougherty’s crimes sneaks up on you, thanks to the lack of adornment, or moments like the sister who sighs that she’s “watched enough Oprah to know” that her brother’s periodic self-destruct moments proceed from what he survived…and that’s the point, that the Dr. Bills in our midsts don’t wait for arty ambient light or minor chords. All they need is for us not to suspect. The point is well made even if the film at first glance wouldn’t seem to be.
Tags: 31 Days 31 Films In A Town This Size Patrick V. Brown Rushmore
Wow. I often find movies and TV shows that I would otherwise miss through this column, previously.tv, and the EHG podcast (what can I say? I’m a fan, and we seem to have such similar taste in popcult!). But this one, I’m going to have to let you watch it for the team… Because, even your summary gave me sad creepy shivers – that “circumcision” line? *brrrr*
I actually caught this on Netflix just before Christmas. I would never have guessed that it was made in 2013, it looks a lot older than that, and for a while the dated look did distract me, but the enormity of the awfulness of Dr. Bill soon completely distracted me from that and I was just kind of sucked into the story and all the absolute devastation he left in his wake… I was really moved, and I thought the documentary was terrific.
I agree. The director didn’t try to be anything he wasn’t as a filmmaker, or strain for what he thought the movie “should” be. He just told the story he wanted to and then ended it. Harder than it looks based on the number of 139-minute features out there.