The Brooklyn Rail

Stanley Kubrick once said, “To see a film once and write a review is an absurdity.” One might respond that to see a film once and not write a review is pretty normal. But every once in a while we see a film that compels us to see it again for its hidden subtleties—and to write a review. This is the case with Jane Weinstock’s latest film, Three Birthdays. This film calls to mind Guy de Maupassant’s literary devices in his classic story, “The Necklace.” In tying together themes and dialogues between different characters, the realism of de Maupassant’s stories is amplified, and Weinstock does something similar in her own interlacing of three stories by three members of a family.

The narrative of the film takes place in 1970—a critical year of Richard Nixon’s presidency, plagued by social unrest, from the demonstration against the war in Vietnam, to the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, and the premature deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin from drug overdoses, along with the end of the 1960s counterculture movement. It is in this context that we become immersed in the respective struggles of the three protagonists: Rob (the father, played by Josh Radnor), Kate (the mother, played by Annie Parisse)—who are both professors at a liberal arts college in Ohio—and Bobbie (Nuala Cleary), their seventeen-year-old daughter.

The action is punctuated by three separate birthdays. The first birthday is Bobbie’s—an ideal product of a progressive, academic upbringing, who is smart, thoughtful, and determined to lose her virginity to her boyfriend Adam (Uly Schlesinger). Life was good until the sudden discovery of an affair her mother was having with her former babysitter, Christopher (Guy Burnet), which prompted her life-changing disillusionment, as she is caught between different social fronts in advocating for feminism, the Sexual Revolution, women’s liberation, the antinuclear movement, the anti-war in Vietnam movement, and private matters concerning family life. The second birthday is Rob’s—the personification of a working-class-made-good by trusting that Marxist dialectics can remedy capitalism’s private ownership and control of production, until everything comes crumbling down, as he loses both his tenured job at the college, and Nina (Jasmine Batchelor), the graduate student with whom he was having an affair. The third birthday opens with Kate, the wife and mother, waking up on a sofa and hearing Rob’s half-confession of his affair with Nina. Kate’s predicament revolves around the contradiction between her advocacy for open marriage and its detrimental effects on her own family life following Nina’s eventual full confession to Kate of the affair with Rob.

Each of the characters struggles to maintain the balance between their internal lives, ideas, and aspirations with the ongoing events inevitably caused by their external surroundings. The problems they face come to a fuller rupture when Bobbie gets shot (but survives) at the Kent State student protest. Along the way there are constant and direct references to Vietnam and Cambodia, as the US’s perpetual proxy wars have countless, direct boomerang effects on the social and political issues on home front, including progressive engineering that elevates inclusivity, closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots, providing opportunities to all, and whatever else may be occurring abroad. These effects include the widespread civil rights and anti-war in Vietnam protests, which also give birth to the Women’s Rights and Gay Rights movements, and even the first Earth Day, among many shifts from counterculture to mainstream culture.

Each character is eventually disillusioned by their entangled circumstances, in which each one’s issues are subsequently revealed: Bobbie’s desire to lose her virginity and her discovery of her mother’s affair; then the revelation of Rob’s brief affair with Nina; and finally, Kate’s relatively long affair (known only to Rob). One also sees occasional filmic or literary references that provide spatial anchorages throughout the film; for example, the space between Adam’s leg that frames Bobbie’s attentive body expression calls forth perhaps Mike Nichols’s iconic scene in The Graduate, but in the reverse order—Dustin Hoffman looking at Anne Bancroft’s leg. There are also reminiscences of Ken Russell’s film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, exploring the complexity of women’s struggles and their agency in relation to patriarchal nexus; or the ending shot of the whole family looking out the window—Rob and Kate looking away on either side of the camera, and Bobbie looking ahead with visible uncertainty—recalls the adolescent Antoine at the end of The 400 Blows staring ahead at an ambiguous future. All of which is enhanced further by the three protagonists’ associations with color—Bobbie with purple (peace, independence, pride), Rob blue (freedom, inspiration, stability), and Kate red (passion, sexuality, revolution).

As one sequence leads to the next, each character’s expectations and aspirations gradually unfold. While Rob has accepted Kate’s extramarital relationship, he in fact has concealed his. Bobbie is an aspiring feminist until her discovery of her mother’s sex life, and it is Kate who ends up being the one who gets punished for her feminist transgressions. I should add that David Lang’s original soundtrack provides swelling, emotional suspense without overt theatricality, and embellishes the cogent script and the wonderful performances of the actors.

Jane Weinstock’s Three Birthdays, in its uncompromising spirit and complete absence of conventional spoon-feeding devices, is an essential and timely cinematic experience. It is also especially germane in the present to our time, given the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which ended the federal right to abortion, and the Trump administration’s recent attacks on reproductive rights. This film deserves to be seen twice.