“Prodigal Sons”

WOW!

Amos Lassen

“Prodigal Sons”, a new documentary by Kimberly Reed, will leave you speechless. Reed is a filmmaker who tells her story and it begins when she returns home for her high school reunion. She is now ready to introduce herself to her hometown as a transgender woman and he has hopes of reconciling with her adopted brother Marc from who she has been separated for a long time. Things become very complicated when it is revealed that Marc may be the grandson of Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth and this causes Kimberly and her family to begin to explore issues of sexual orientation, identity, love and trauma.

This is a documentary that shows what documentaries are all about. Obviously Reed knew where she was going with this film when she began it–she wanted to show the reaction of her hometown after she had transitioned from male to female and instead she finds herself faced with her brother’s own identity crisis. She begins to deal with who he is and who he is in the process of becoming rather then her own questions of “coming home”. Here is a film that is impossible to predict–even if you know a bit ahead of time. It constantly surprises the viewer. We see Reed dealing with her own insecurities as a trans woman especially when she is outside of her own comfort zone, i.e. at the reunion. Her friends once only knew her as the football jock. However when her own definition of self meets with that of her mentally ill adopted brother, all notions of queer identity are thrown for a loop.

At first we think we are going to see another trans coming out story. Kimberly, the former football playing jock, arrives home as a woman with a female partner, a successful career and a life in New York. She was not met with hostility or anger at the reunion–she was warmly greeted and totally welcomed home. However she was not quite ready for the most challenging aspect of her trip home, that of meeting with her adopted older brother. Marc really wants to be close to Kimberly and Claire, her partner but he is not able to let go of his own feelings of inferiority from his past and Kimberly wants nothing to do with them. Marc’s discovery that his mother was Rebecca Welles does not help and he finds himself mourning a mother he never knew and totally immersing himself in the life of his grandfather with some help from Welles’s soul mate in Croatia.

We learn a lot about grace and acceptance here and we come to understand that we cannot turn the other cheek to those who have lost mental capability. At the end of the film there is the beginning of a transformation and there is a sense that hope will pull the family through this crisis. Kimberly discovered that even though she thought that she had completed her transitioning when she returned home for the reunion but she learned that she still had to reclaim her own past.

The film deals with the universal truths that every family struggles with and we see that the film is also about love and how a family faces challenges and then becomes victorious in a way that no one could ever have imagined. The film is universal in outlook and it will cause the hardest of us to weep as we watch this amazing exploration of sibling rivalry.