Maybe it’s part of our modern, anti-depressant popping, workaholic, Starbucks-addled condition, but it seems as though every other film is about dissatisfaction. Documentary filmmaker Doug Block in his film 51 Birch Street presents his own family as an object lesson: malcontent and our collective inability to pursue our own happiness is an integral part of our culture.

The film begins 50 years after Block’s parents Mike and Mina said “I do.” The scene is familiar: children playing; grill on the patio; old folks and relations wheezing on the lawn; and, congratulations for making their marriage “work.” But the filmmaker is quick to comment that, given his father’s distant nature and his mother’s gregarious personality, the secrets of his parents’ successful marriage are just that: secrets.

We’re told that shortly after the anniversary party, Mina became ill and died. Before this news can have any real effect, we learn that Mike, now a widower, has re-connected with his old secretary and will be married only three months after his first wife’s death. The rage felt by his children is palpable, but Mike is ambivalent: he and his new wife, Cathy, display their affection openly, and his children wonder how a man who remained coolly distant toward them and their mother is able to lavish his new wife with kisses so freely.

Once Mike reveals that he and Kathy will be relocating to Florida to live out their golden years, the filmmaker begins to question his parents’ relationship: “Were they ever happy? What happened to this marriage that it could be forgotten so easily?”

The film begs for a villain, but its genius is in presenting Mike and Mina as casualties of middle-class life. Through interviews with his father and his mother (posthumously, of course), we learn that as the world changed around them, Mike and Mina became more distant: she lost herself in psychoanalysis, affairs, and her interior life; Mike buried himself in his work. When they both came up for air, three decades into their marriage, the two realized that, outside of their children, they were strangers.

The filmmaker allows us to see his parents as he sees them: Mike Block, now in his twilight years, makes half-hearted attempts to connect with his son by offering tools and badly-drawn 70s kitsch; Mina, though dead, acknowledges the failure of her marriage and her husband’s ignorance in volume after volume of her wire-bound diaries.

I found it hard to think of 51 Birch Street as a film. It’s more like being dropped into a family and watching it move around you. The camera work is comfortably low key, even off at certain times, and it appears that any real direction is eschewed for a more organic feel.  51 Birch Street is not one of those documentaries where you walk away thinking that you know the characters, but it’s not necessary that you do. All that’s required is for you to feel the length and breadth of their dissatisfaction and realize that that, too, is okay.

In The Fray Contributor