A look at Andrew Durham’s debut film, Fairyland, adapted from Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir, Fairyland : A Memoir of My Father…
by: Jennifer Parker
Sometimes it takes a film like Fairyland to remind us that we don’t need the internet to inform us that childhood isn’t always fair, that diseases don’t have names before they are part of the zeitgeist, and that parents are imperfect. We just need a little bit of movie magic to suspend the here and now in a dark theater and allow ourselves to be spellbound. Written and directed by filmmaker Andrew Durham,* Fairyland whisks viewers back to a time to the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when this unnamed disease was nothing short of a death sentence. It takes moviegoers into a world where a young daughter is being raised by her father, a dad who was gay yet didn’t know the first thing about brushing his child’s hair before school. In Fairyland, Durham journeys from 1974 to the early 1990s in just under two hours, allowing both father and daughter to grow into themselves without ever fully growing up. By inserting pivotal moments in San Francisco’s history into the film, including breaking news of Mayor Harvey Milk’s assassination, headlines in newsstands highlight the tragedy at Jonestown, and archival news footage of the mysterious cancer killing gay men, Durham convincingly moves chronologically and affectingly through the lives of the characters.
Andrew Durham’s debut film is adapted from Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir, Fairyland : A Memoir of My Father, an excellent book based on her own experience of her mother dying in a tragic accident when she was a child. As the story goes, Abbott moves in with her single, now free to be out and uncloseted father, Steve (Scoot McNairy, Argo and 12 Years a Slave), in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Upending the coming-of-age story, instead of veering away from uncomfortable tropes or stereotypes of how kids and adults treated the gay community, even in progressive San Francisco, Durham confronts this complex dynamic head-on. To commence the film, he successfully transports us through Alysia’s childhood by utilizing 16mm film, inviting us into the perspective of a child with the wobbliness and shakiness of being rocked out of their nuclear childhood existence. As father and daughter find stability in their new community, so does the tone of the film as it deftly moves into longer and steadier shots of the actors. The Haight and the social upheaval of the latter part of the 20th century come into focus, which is easy to dismiss as the passage of time rather than the duality of allowing the characters to transform.
Alysia is initially portrayed by Nessa Dougherty, a first-time actor, and later by Emilia Jones of Coda and Task,. When young actors are at the heart of a film, it is crucial when and how a screenwriter / director chooses to employ dialogue, and Durham elects to use it sparingly, particularly in the first half of the film. Here, Alysia is in high school, and her words increasingly have impact as the film progresses, eventually overcoming the soul of her father as well as every audience member in the theater who has felt abject failure if a loved one has ever accused them of not being the person they needed, even if they were the person they wanted.
The film features a deep ensemble cast, including Oscar® winner Geena Davis, who portrays, with restraint, Alysia’s disapproving Midwestern grandmother, Munca. It’s easy to see where there were opportunities for an actress as renowned as Ms. Davis to take a larger role in controlling the film’s narrative as the woman who not only lost her daughter to a horrible accident, but also lost her granddaughter to her gay son-in-law who wastes no time after his wife’s funeral to pack up his not quite orange, not quite red, VW Bug and move to a shared housing flat, sight unseen, with his five-year-old in tow. Every scene with Davis is breathtaking. Produced by Durham’s longtime collaborative partner, Oscar® winner Sofia Coppola, Fairyland, like almost every movie ever made, takes an army of collaborators and talent, both on and off screen. For those of us privileged to see the finished product, it is easy to dismiss any film as a vehicle for making money. In reality, all films are love children of a commune of creators. Do them a solid, try to see their babies on the big screen.
Fairyland is available on all major platforms starting Nov 4.
*Andrew Durham, the writer and director of Fairyland, is also, full disclosure, someone I have known for the better part of four decades. We went to film school together, helped each other move, dealt with the deaths of our fathers, ate countless dinners, went to each other’s birthday parties, stayed up late writing papers, and drifted apart for several decades while he successfully pursued an artistic career. I lived out my childish fantasy of being the parent I wished I had and eventually started writing about film and music.
Read more from Jennifer Parker here.
