A Lion in the House
(Julia Reichert & Steven Bognar, US)

Normal critical faculties are dwarfed in the face of something like A Lion in the House, though such phrasing already contains a fallacy: there has never been anything “like” A Lion in the House. Anyone who sees Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s monumental documentary will remark on its “scope,” its “expansiveness”—and by implication, its length. Yet there would be no other way for this film to exist: the feeling of time passing over Lion’s four-hour and six-year duration is what makes its every emotional rumbling hit with the force of a hurricane. Yet as with any great nonfiction film, it’s the little moments that remain fixed in the memory; in this case, they lodge like shrapnel. Just one week after seeing—rather, bearing witness to—A Lion in the House, I had a bit of an emotional breakdown when I recalled what for me has become the defining image of Reichert and Bognar’s epic journey: little Alex Lougheed, no more than seven years old, after months of treatment for childhood lymphoma in Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital Medical Center, is finally released to go home. One eye swollen shut from infection, one cheek puffed out in bruised lumps, tears streaming down her face, Alex wails in front of the camera with apparent agony. When asked what’s wrong, the tiny, fragile, yet stunningly resilient Alex responds, through choked cries and hiccups, that she’s happy. Happy to be going back home, to be rejoining her whole family, to be relieved, if only for a moment, of the monotony and pain and procedure of her medical treatment—surely too conflicted an emotion for a seven-year-old to have to express.
            The sadness of the scene might not seem particularly hard-won for a filmmaker, so inherently devastating is the subject matter. Yet thanks to all the hours of footage, all the years of large heartaches and small triumphs and trials that have come before, we know Alex intimately. The bright-eyed, good-natured girl who has had to readjust to school over and over because she’s missed so much time for treatment; who had maintained an inspiringly positive outlook amidst so much pain; who had been given the Cutest Personality award at summer camp. Through interviews, confessionals, fly-on-the-wall moments of personal drama, she has become a member of our extended family. Through the camera, she belongs to us.
            This is where A Lion in the House both demolishes all notions of documentary aesthetics as well as reinforces the intrinsic value and the unique nature of film itself as an instrument of inquiry, compassion, and memorial. The film is so steadfast in its determination to document the suffering of others, as it’s being lived, now, here, every day, behind millions of closed doors in seemingly placid neighborhoods, that it almost feels intrusive—not to its subjects, but to us as viewers. Exiting the theater after such a headlong dive into our own fears brings not sadness, however, but elation and a sense of connectedness. It’s a confrontation with death, but it heralds something that even our greatest, most layered and symbolic fictions, like Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997) or Lynne Littman’s Testament (1983), could never manage. This is not something as simple as “truth” or “reality” or any other doc catchwords—A Lion in the House is nothing less than a work of towering human empathy, and goes further in uniting its audience in one conjoined emotional experience than any other film I’ve ever seen.
            A casual, dismissive wave of the hand could relegate Lion to the status of a “cancer doc,” and that it focuses exclusively on the inhabitants (rarely interacting but obviously aware of each other’s participation in the film) of Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital, overseen by the eminently compassionate, avuncular, Camus-quoting Dr. Robert Arceci, could also lead the skeptical to believe its primary function is as a hospital teaching tool. Yet as much as the film could benefit those who are battling disease, or who must watch a loved one’s body deteriorate, A Lion in the House might be most valuable to those who have yet to come face to face with the death of a loved one. With a marvelously measured editing rhythm and an accumulation of details that builds to beautifully spaced out emotional catharses, Reichert and Bognar present their five main families, from different races and income brackets, not as case studies, but as vessels for our spiritual edification, for a better understanding of what it must be like to see through someone else’s eyes.
In the gracefully constructed first half of the film, we meet three kids, all wildly different, yet all already somewhat resigned to a life of unending in-and-out care and habitual relapses. Sarcastic and pragmatic, tall and handsome when he opens the film at 19 years old, Justin Ashcraft, who has been battling leukemia for ten years, will transform before our eyes over and over, his face and body an amorphous battlefield of scars and wear; Tim Woods, 15 years old, quick-witted, animated, hugely compassionate, full of bonhomie yet fatigued and disillusioned by his constant struggles with Hodgkins lymphoma; and the aforementioned Alex, whose young life has been plagued with so much pain. If the act of living itself seems to be an endurance test to these children and their weary parents (for whom every moment is a battle of wills between hope and reality, between maintaining a calm outlook for their children’s sake and wrestling with their internal anguish), they nevertheless fight against sickness and the spectre of death with an almost superhuman fervency. The differences in response, in prayer, in economic struggle, between these three families makes up the film’s core; each is given long passages of screen time, their small and large successes counterpoised to the humbling, ongoing odyssey in which these are merely momentary gradations. Before the relief of intermission, we will have journeyed so far and wide with them that not knowing their individual fates plays like the most cruel, yet wholly unmanipulative, form of suspense. When, in a structural sleight of hand, the filmmakers introduce us in Part Two to our final two resilient children—the alternately tough and vulnerable eleven-year-old Al Fields and the sweet nine-year-old Jen Moore—A Lion in the House has already provided enough overwhelming emotional catharses for five films.
The miracle here is that Reichert and Bognar direct with an attentiveness to medical procedure yet with not a hint of clinical distance. Their approach has been compared to that of Frederick Wiseman, but Wiseman’s grand structural hypotheses have no place in Lion’s living-room intimacy. Reichert and Bognar never interject or make their presence thematically integral, yet their sensibilities imbue every frame. One may be reminded of Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) when Reichert and Bognar unflinchingly show Tim slowly taking in a feeding tube through his nasal cavity; initially defiant, Tim suddenly chokes on the intrusion and vomits all over his chest. The camera remains fixed on his face, now defeated, sullen, humiliated; suddenly, he’s not the same vibrant Tim we have grown to love. In Titicut, this same procedure performed upon an unwilling inmate of the Massachusetts Bridgewater hospital for the “criminally insane” is meant to stand for the state’s cruel process of incremental dehumanization; in Lion, the image speaks for itself.
In fact, all of Lion in the House’s sociopolitical undercurrents—the plainly evident differences in health care coverage, working lives, and even the amount of time these parents are able to devote to their desperately ill children between the Caucasian and African-American subjects—are all just part of the fabric of everyday life, a natural progression of the filmmakers’ use of the camera as tool for creating social awareness. Reichert, who co-directed 1976’s landmark doc on the women’s workers’ movement Union Maids, and Bognar, whose 1996 film on his father, Personal Belongings, had also been a mammoth eight-year undertaking, are documentary filmmakers of the old school, taking a traditional, unblinking approach that cuts decisively against the grain of the current glut of the popularized documentary, largely eschewing intrusive cutting, scoring, or self-righteous indignation to make its points. Like the greatest works of nonfiction, it exists wholly outside of trends without ever departing from the now: it depicts trauma with both the universal cry and the achingly immediate empathy it wholly deserves.
            In the face of such experience, of such a powerful dissolution of the boundaries between aesthetics and life, the task of criticism calls not for distanced judgment but communal dialogue. And with my coeditors at the online film journal Reverse Shot, I’ve been proud to dissolve the boundaries between advocacy and activism: Reverse Shot has been aiding the film in seeking theatrical outlets. We have no delusions of grandeur, just belief in the film’s utter goodness and transformative effects. In light of the sheer necessity of this overwhelming film, the passivity we so often bring to filmgoing and film viewing seems even more inadequate. It’s the rare film that can transform the so often anonymous community of filmgoers into a communion of hope.

—Michael Koresky

A Lion in the House .

Articles in this Section

Strangers with Candy (Paul Dinello, US)
By Jessica Winter

web only

A Lion in the House b
By Michael Koresky

and in the magazine..

Gabrielle
By Dorothy Woodend

Lunacy
By Michael Sicinski