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Assisted Living Massachusetts
QUESTION: Actors play aides, and actors play residents, and some of the residents play
roles in their own story.
Before Elliot Greenebaum's debut film, "Assisted Living" -- shot in several
real-life retirement and nursing homes -- was even released this month, its
trailer, which has been available for the past five months on the Internet,
drew a flurry of e-mail messages from nursing-home administrators and
caregivers, as well as editors of aging-related newsletters across the
country. A good many were positive. Adding to the hum of enthusiasm was the
fact that "Assisted Living" had won prizes at various film festivals --
Slamdance, GenArt, Woodstock and Savannah. But a number of others were
virulent in their outrage.
One caregiver with more than 20 years of experience wrote that the movie
"isn't funny and it isn't worthy of any awards. It is base, cruel and
disgusting. And everyone who worked on this movie will either be dead before
their time or they will grow old. Percentage-wise, some of you will develop
Alzheimer's." Another experienced caregiver wrote that the film "sets back
the profession of nursing care years. . . . Based on what I viewed, the film
is not accurate, not compassionate and would serve the public best by
burning it."
The National Center for Assisted Living, alarmed by the way staff members
and administrators were portrayed in the finished film, issued an "E-Alert"
with media talking points meant to reassure the American public that the
N.C.A.L.'s member homes weren't anything like what Greenebaum portrayed:
"Assisted-living professionals consider it essential that staff caring for
residents are knowledgeable and compassionate people who strive to respect
residents' dignity and provide a high standard of quality of life."
"Assisted Living" chronicles the day an aide and janitor named Todd is fired
from his job at a nursing home. Todd, adeptly played by Michael Bonsignore,
is the quintessential dude -- a heavy pot smoker, unkempt, habitually late,
self-consumed, a prankster. One of his duties is to attend to Mrs. Pearlman
(Maggie Riley), who imagines that her only living relative, her son, lives
in Australia. Mrs. Pearlman suffers from Alzheimer's and has
indiscriminately transferred her affection for her absent son onto Todd,
who, touched by Mrs. Pearlman's existential crisis, assumes the role of the
son. What unfolds is both funny and painful -- and sometimes undignified.
But the real difficulty of the film lies not with its plot but with its
making. Had Greenebaum, who at age 23 wrote, produced and directed "Assisted
Living" (he is now 27), simply hired a full cast of professional actors, he
most likely wouldn't be receiving angry letters (or awards) from anyone. But
-- with the exception of Riley, Bonsignore and a few others -- Greenebaum's
actors and extras are actual residents of several personal-care facilities
and nursing homes in his hometown, Louisville, Ky. They are called by their
real names, live in their real rooms and eat in their real dining halls.
Some also take on speaking roles. And it's these scenes that trouble some of
the film's critics, who suspect that the residents may not be fully aware of
how they come off. The objections are to sequences like the one in which a
dazed-looking elderly woman wearing wraparound sunglasses and a ridiculous
sock puppet on her right hand -- "George, the assertive monkey" -- plays out
a mock assertiveness-training drill with Todd. Or to the one in which Todd
makes prank phone calls to the residents from heaven and speaks to them in
the voices of their dead relatives.
Greenebaum's unconventional method plays out like a cross between Errol
Morris and Todd Solondz. Cinematically that may be a good thing, but it's at
the root of the negative reactions. Because Riley, who plays the
Alzheimer's-addled Mrs. Pearlman, is herself not much younger than many of
the residents, there's nothing that quickly sets her apart from the
nonactors in the film. And because most of the nonactors are themselves,
simply by virtue of their age, in less than optimal health, it is easy to
equate physical frailty with mental frailty, whether or not the two actually
overlap.
Greenebaum maintains that the two aren't the same at all. He likes to point
out that the residents who took an active role in "Assisted Living" knew
what they'd be asked to do; they all signed consent forms, and those consent
forms were vetted by the three facilities with which he collaborated. Still,
the question of consent has always been a tricky legal issue, not to mention
an ethical one. And here's where things get a little murky.
No one seems more aware of this than Greenebaum. Included in Greenebaum's
final print were faces of dying residents filmed inside a hospital ward.
Although there were no legal constraints on the use of these images -- those
residents had since died -- Greenebaum was still troubled. Ultimately, he
cut the shots from the film. "In documentary filmmaking, moral questions
work according to context," he said. "We all agree that if I made a porn
movie and inserted images from the Alzheimer's ward into the film, it would
be morally terrible. The way something is used is so important that it
overrides consent."
By grafting farcical story lines onto his cinema verite scenes, inventing
character traits and relationships, "Assisted Living" magnifies the issues
of exposure raised by films like Frederick Wiseman's "Titicut Follies." In
1967, Wiseman's movie was banned in Massachusetts after the state argued
that the film, a documentary of life in a mental institution, violated the
privacy of its vulnerable subjects. Greenebaum makes the terrain even
muddier. The question of what the subjects consented to reveal about
themselves is complicated by the fact that they are playing characters based
on their real-life selves. This is something Greenebaum is fully conscious
of and even embraces. "Because the documentary is shot in the same style
that the fiction is shot," he says, "it's sometimes confusing -- in an
exciting way, I think -- what kind of moment one is watching."
For the N.C.A.L., the film's documentary feel was confusing in a pernicious
way. The style suggested that what the film portrayed -- aides stoned on the
job, administrators drinking in the middle of the day, absurd jokes
seemingly made at the expense of residents -- was real. You might accuse
administrators of merely lacking a sense of humor, but even Greenebaum
concedes there's more to it than that.
"When some people watch my film," Greenebaum said, "they ask a lot of
different questions. But what they really seem to be wanting to ask is:
'What kind of propaganda is this? Is it for or against old people? Is it for
or against the nursing industry?' This has a lot to do with how delicate a
subject aging is and how guilty we feel about the suffering of our parents."
It also had a lot to do, he said, with what people are used to watching on
TV and in mainstream films -- "The Golden Girls," "Cocoon" and "60
Minutes"-style exposes on seniors desperately in search of cheap
prescription medication.
"Old people are shown to be either insanely happy or insanely sad,"
Greenebaum said. "I wanted to achieve some kind of balance and show people
something they've never seen before." What we get through Todd's
pot-impaired point of view is a hard (yet funny and poignant) look at the
quotidian slow-motion world of the aged, in which it is a triumph to pull on
a sock or slipper, to spoon a mouthful of peach cobbler into a mouth, to
reach for the ground with a pair of shaking skeletal hands for something
that isn't even there. It is in these moments that we feel as if we're
observing the human body decelerate and decay and balance right on the cusp
of death. Without them, the narrative would never transcend its
TV-movie-of-the-week pathos.
One cold Louisville morning in December, Greenebaum screened "Assisted
Living" at the Masonic Homes of Kentucky for his surviving actors -- some
have died since he finished filming more than three years ago. He decided to
show an abridged version of the film, cutting out not just the faces of
dying residents but any scenes in the hospital ward at all. He didn't want
to subject the residents of Masonic to images of people living out their
final days (though some of them did later attend the premiere). It is easy
to greet Greenebaum's decision with a smirk. Wasn't this an admission that
his critics were right, that the movie really did exploit its subjects?
Didn't Greenebaum just want to have it both ways -- making claims to being
true to life and then playing with the material as if it were a purely
invented story?
Greenebaum was unusually nervous standing before his cast. Stammering a
little, he introduced the movie and then turned it on and turned the volume
up as loud as it would go. As each of the characters came up on the screen,
the residents called out that person's name, and when those who had died
appeared, there came murmurs of, "I remember her." "I remember him." "What
was his name?" "What was her name?" With the exception of Sue South, who
told Greenebaum she wouldn't attend the screening ("I don't like seeing dead
people walk around," she said), no one appeared to be unnerved.
When I told some of the residents who had speaking roles in "Assisted
Living" that people had raised objections to the movie, they seemed puzzled.
"That scene when you're talking to heaven?" Greenebaum explained to Edna
Bentley. "When young people watch that, they think you're not smart. They
think you've been tricked."
Bentley puckered her lips and shook her head. "I don't care. I did the best
I can, and I tried to do right. If someone thinks something wrong of me, I
can't help it."
You realize, I said, that Greenebaum's movie is going to be opening in
theaters across the ...
ANSWER: Is this a reality "slice of life" or exploitation of society's
weaker citizens?
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