Ray Prdie

"Twist of Faith" is director Kirby Dick ("Sick," "Derrida") and producer Eddie Schmidt's wrenching, intimate documentary about Tony Comes, a regular guy Roman Catholic who discovers that the Toledo home he's just bought for his family is five doors down from a religion teacher and priest, Dennis Gray, who Comes says molested him when he was 14.

Intense, yes, but "Twist of Faith" is also canny, immediate, intimate, raw and unflinching. This straightforward film is a simple and transparent exemplar of documentary empathy as well--masterful, heartfelt and heartbreaking.

At Sundance this year, I talked to Dick and Schmidt right after its Oscar nomination was announced, but Schmidt told me this week that HBO executives "really believe in the power of `Twist of Faith.' That's why we're continuing in theatrical release even after a one-time premiere on the channel. I think that in the future we'll see more documentaries released theatrically and on TV almost simultaneously, or at least within a more condensed period of time. Even the Academy rules have changed to forecast patterns like this. The reality is that television has a lot of documentary funders and champions, and can reach more viewers. But the theatrical viewing experience is like no other, and the press attention is much more serious. Hopefully there's a way to combine the best aspects of both venues now that more people are aware of what documentary storytelling can be."

The subject matter may have dissuaded larger distributors despite the filmmakers' skillful work. "The fact that it isn't upbeat, like a "Spellbound" or "Mad Hot Ballroom," makes a little bit of a tougher sell." But Schmidt thinks audiences will "get" it if they will only come to see it. "I'd like to think it doesn't take a special viewer once they're willing to sit down with it. It plays very cinematically, and there is a 'traditional' aspect to the storytelling that is universal to American film audiences."

When I talked to the pair in January, Dick admitted that he'd "only watched it once with an audience. I was surprised by how emotionally affected I was after having seen it alone and with very small groups. I'd always considered that there really isn't that much of a difference between viewing something on tape and viewing something in a theater, if you're really thinking. But this film seems to be an exception, it becomes a group emotional experience."

Why? "I think it's the subject matter, it's Tony Comes and [his wife] Wendy. They're people who [audiences] really identify with. [When] you get into such personal aspects of their family life, it starts touching people."

"When we were cutting it," Schmidt recounts, "I imagined there are moments that audiences would have a reaction to, because they are shocking, reactions, gasping at things, horrible, awful, that the audience has a collective experience of being moved. I start to tear up during some stuff--things that I've watched hundreds and hundreds of times and I know how they're put together--but they're raw. The way Tony is able to communicate his feelings in such a razor-sharp way, it cuts, it cuts through the filmmaking."

They like working with small formats, their experience with digital video chiming with that of other documentary figures like Abbas Kiarostami and Albert Maysles: you can keep eye contact. "You can be in situations where it's something that with a large format you might not even shoot," Dick says. "You have the camera, you're walking someplace to shot, you're talking, the conversation goes in a direction where the material is very good, you're still having that conversation, but you're reflectively covering it."

"I always think this kind of filmmaking is like playing jazz," Schmidt adds. "You're in the moment, someone is revealing something, something's happening you can't plan. You have to pay attention to what's being said and exactly how it's being said."

"I like to have an arc of questions that I can pull from if I need to," Dick continues. "I'm sure you know this, too. But you can see the way somebody answers one question, you might just pull out a whole set of questions and not even ask those. In the interview with Wendy, the thing that struck me when I was talking to Tony in that car, on that drive, is that he's talking about how this experience with Dennis Gray, being abused by Dennis Gray, is in his bedroom every time, every time he's had sex with a woman, making love to his wife. So I started thinking, what is this experience for Wendy? I mean, they've talked about it, it must be in her head, too. But Tony is someone who's very forthcoming, he'll bring that up on his own. But she's another person. So a lot of that conversation was setting the interview up to get to that very question.

"One of the many reasons they're together is they had a great sex life. They have a great sex life," Dick says. "When Tony drove around, he [pointed], `We made out there, we made out there.'" Schmidt laughs. "I mean, they were happy together," Dick says, more emphatic. "They really clicked. It's tragic that this intensity is so marred by this experience. I wanted to bring that out."

"Twist of Faith" opens Friday at Facets.

(2005-07-26)

Also by Ray Prdie

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