Steve Erickson
Michael Roemer’s work has rarely been appreciated in its own time. For film after film, it’s taken decades for American culture to catch up. His Wikipedia entry credits his hour-long 1949 debut, A Touch of the Times, as “possibly the first feature film produced at an American college.” (It may now be a piece of lost media.) Almost all his major films have been kept on the shelf for decades before their eventual release to theaters. Although Nothing But a Man was Malcolm X’s favorite film, it had to wait till 1993 for wide distribution. The Plot Against Harry was rejected by distributors in 1969, going unreleased for 20 years. NBC censored his documentary Cortile Cascino by destroying the negative (although a copy survived), appalled by the desperate poverty and Mafia domination of Sicily it revealed.
While he was able to produce several movies for PBS, they tended to stay bound to the small screen. (The IMDB credits Pilgrim, Farewell, produced by Boston’s WGBH and the German TV channel ZDF, as an episode of the public television network’s American Playhouse.) Vengeance Is Mine suffered the same fate as The Plot Against Harry, never getting a theatrical run till 2022. The Film Desk is fleshing out our access to Roemer’s filmography by reviving Pilgrim, Farewell and his thematically related 1976 documentary Dying, which profiled three cancer patients.
Is it too much of a stretch to read the impact of the director’s youth as a German-Jewish refugee, forced to flee his home country to avoid the Holocaust, in Pilgrim, Farewell? Certainly, this tale of a life cut down young contains a deep pessimism about fate’s arbitrary cruelty. Pilgrim, Farewell, made in 1980 and shown on PBS two years later, strips its characters’ emotional resources down to the bone. Centering on a family who’ve gathered together as Kate (Elizabeth Huddle) slowly succumbs to cancer, it’s a chamber drama. A 39-year-old widow, Kate is introduced as she’s about to undergo a scan. Her daughter Annie (Laurie Prange) and her lover Paul (Christopher Lloyd) watch. Shaking with nerves, Annie runs away rather than witness her mother’s weakness, but Kate postpones it so they can be together. Kate and Paul share a house in rural Vermont, where her sister Becca (Leslie Paxton) has come to stay with them.
Roemer expertly uses images of nature as punctuation, providing a tiny spell of relief for both the characters and audience. The cinematography is slightly grainy, but it brings out the verdant colors of Vermont’s mountains. Roemer offers painterly images of the sun transformed into a ball of red light seen through leaves. Rain blurs and softens the view from car windows. But the benefits of this beauty are temporary: Kate rarely gets in the car except for a visit to the hospital. When life gets too difficult, the house’s rowboat is a refuge. It’s also a social space, if only for two people at a time. Yet when Kate gets into it alone, she lies down as though she were in a coffin, letting it slowly drift.
Pilgrim, Farewell avoids explicit images. Kate never throws up onscreen, while she only gets a syringe stuck in her arm once. At its most graphic, the film shows her coughing up blood several times. Even the makeup is restrained: Kate never looks unnaturally gaunt. Yet the material reality of the body’s decline still comes across. Kate’s longing for physical closeness brings her pain. She says that sex hurts her. Cuddling with another person leads her to scream in agony
Speaking to MUBI last year, Roemer described Pilgrim, Farewell as his most confrontational film, saying “there are moments that scare the hell out of me still.” Watching it gives one the feeling that Roemer, as well as his characters, had a lot to get off his chest after his time away from filmmaking. Kate’s mortality frees her to speak her mind without worrying about being likable. Far from being at peace, she’s enormously angry at the end of her life, taking it out on Paul and Annie. They respond with equal fury. He tells her, “I can take your illness, but not your craziness.” The suicide of Kate’s husband casts a pall over the family. Annie wonders out loud why Kate, who was likely just out of her teens when she was born, didn’t have her aborted. Paul and Kate go through so much stress that they have to work it off through crafts; he spends his time splitting wood with an axe, while she creates pottery.
Kate’s cruelty and shifting moods can make her as unpleasant to be around as Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character in Hard Truths. Yet Pilgrim, Farewell cuts right to the tragedy of a woman who will never have the chance to heal from the scars life inflicted upon her. A difficult watch, it’s a rewarding dig into the wounds most films prettify or suppress.
“Pilgrim, Farewell” opens Friday at New York City’s Film Forum from a new 35mm print.
