Prodigal Sons (Monday, December 27, 2010) (165)

The writer/director of the documentary Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed, was born as Paul McKerrow in Helena Montana. Her older brother Marc was only 11 months her senior and was adopted by her parents just before she was born. Placed into the same year in school the two McKerrow brothers were competitive for attention, but Marc always seemed to lose to his younger brother, who was the high school quarterback and a hunk.

Secretly Paul was struggling with his own identity and ultimately transitioned to become a woman. Around the same time, Marc got in a car accident that left him with significant brain damage that made him volatile and not the same guy he was before the accident. The two broke off contact for about a decade.

As this film opens, they both are going back to their high school reunion where they are different people (on the outside or the inside) from what they were before. Kim is now a woman, living as a lesbian with a wife in New York City; Marc is functioning at a different speed than he used do and suffers from mood swings that he controls with meds. The two try to work on their relationship and try to rediscover who each one is now at this point in their lives.

This is a very beautiful story, one that is so perfectly balanced and symmetrical that it nearly has to be made into a documentary. At one point in voice over, Kim says something to the effect that Marc only hopes to be the man that she never wanted to be. It's a pretty fabulous line in an interesting story.

As with many documentaries, I think the last third is a bit rocky and loses its way a bit. Marc has a breakdown around Christmas time and assaults their younger brother (who is also gay). He's put in jail for a spell. Once this happens, some of the air is taken out of the story, without an interesting foil, Kim becomes less interesting to us.

This is a good movie, but I wonder if that is helped dramatically by the amazingness of the true story that exists. I am not sure that I would see another film by Kim Reed... nothing against her, but I think this was her story and now that it's done, it's done. (I don't want to ruin anything, but there's a totally amazing revelation in the middle of the film about who Marc's birth grandparents were. The film is almost worth seeing for that alone.)

Stars: 2.5 of 4