Constellation (2006)

Strange how rare the movies ever really understand the family dynamic. Most movies about family are either dramas strung together out of shouting matches or comedies that include a lot of colorful caricatures set up for the benefit of silly pratfalls. I hate it when filmmakers try to appeal to what they think I want to see. It is so rare to find one film that can settle down and actually listen to it's characters. It's nice to find a movie that flows from the personalities of it's characters not a wind-up plot to move them around.

Constellation, which plays like a Toni Morrison novel by way of of Robert Altman, explores the crumbling social connection of a family who, through the cosmic luck of the draw, find themselves attached to people they otherwise couldn't care less about. The Boxer family are estranged from each other and they like it that way. They have such a varied and bitter history that they are only gathered together by an event that they can't make excuses to miss: A family funeral.

The frame-structure of Constellation begins in the Alabama of the pre-Civil Rights years when pretty Carmel (Gabriel Union) falls in love with a handsome white man named Bear. The social climate and the prospect of death keep these two starry-eyed lovers from ever having anything of a future together. So it is probably the best thing for both when they are separated by his overseas military duty.

The movie barely touches on that relationship, focusing instead on the petty present-day problems of Carmel's family who have gathered for her funeral. What is most interesting about Constellation is to see how Carmel's attempts at an interracial romance contrast what will later happen to the succeeding generation. They harbor dark resentments toward one another but like most families there is love residing within them. Still, every family member would be ectatic to be anywhere else. The surprise of Constellation is that while their connection to one another is bitter, it's not a series a shouting matches. Every character, both black and white is so well defined that director Jordan Walker-Perlman succeeds in greying the racial lines so we can move past those hang-ups and get to know the people for what they are: people.

The characters have histories and do not simply existing for the sake of the plot. Perlman never gives them a clear goal but allows them to move in and out of the frame so that we aren't saddled with a conveyer belt of personal problems. Perlman understands that life isn't simply a series of plot points, but of intelligent people. He understands where the darkest corners of their human connection reside. He is a very good storyteller as well because he never hurries the material, he has the patience to tell the story as it unfolds, rather than trying to make it all clear at the beginning so that characters can move from Point A to Point B.

He also succeeds in portraying Alabama not as a Land of Dogs and Fire Hoses but as a real place with the same reality-bites feel as L.A. or New York. This is one of those movies in which a city becomes another character and the location of Huntsville, Alabama gives it a fresh tone. We haven't been there much in the movies and the location plays into the plight of the characters, particularly when the movie arrives at Carmel's heart-tugging eulogy.

Amid the location, we are introduced to the family: We meet Helms (Billy Dee Williams), Carmel's younger brother, who has estranged himself from the family. We meet his ex-wife Nancy - nicely played by Leslie Ann Warren, unceremoniously worn down by the disappointments of her life. We meet Carmel's daughters Melissa and Lucy, who are suffering their own soap opera relationships and other petty problems even though they have barely left their college years. We meet Bear (Dan Clennon) Carmel's lover who was forced to abandon her all those years ago - leaving her to be raped by a group of disapproving locals - but never-the-less kept writing letters back and forth until her death. We meet Erroll, a photographer who is trying to keep himself out of a series of regrets later in life - he has a nice scene in which he remembers a trip to Africa in which to male friends held hands, not in a homosexual manner but out a friendship absent of social hang-ups. We also meet Celeste who was Rosa's best friend who hooked up with Erroll, her boyfriend, through a misunderstanding.

But the most interesting character in the film is Rosa, played beautifully by Zoe Saldana. As Carmel's niece, she plays Rosa as a woman who nurtures her frustrations as they well up from the pits of her stomach and take residence in the corners of her mouth. Peering into her sad eyes we see a wearyness and the suggestion that her life has been a series of broken hearts and broken dreams, made all the more lamentable by the fact that she's still on the underside of 30.

I love the subtle way Perlman has of expressing his characters without a lot of dialogue. Billy Dee Williams gives a wonderful performance of quiet subtlety as Helm's Boxer, Carmel's younger brother who helped his sister spend time with her boyfriend. Now is his later years, his eyes express a lifetime of frustration and regret, of what his sister might have become. He expresses himself through his paintings (actually painted by Williams himself), works of bold colors and sharp edges, his works are beautifully abstract.

Pearlman achieves something that would be a handicap in the hands of a lesser director, he juggles 10 characters, allows them all to flourish, injects them with humanity and achieves in all in a running time of just 96 minutes. His characters are so beautifully defined, even those who have almost no screen time, that anyone one of them could earn a film of their own.