Phoebe’s Father (2015 | USA | 95 minutes | John Helde)
Released previously in 2015, Seattle filmmaker John Helde is bringing his film Phoebe’s Father back to the Northwest Film Forum to play in its virtual cinema and then become available on streaming formats. This is all good news because Phoebe’s Father is a hidden gem of a movie that affected me deeply. Between 2015 and now, Helde also directed another movie I loved called Brown’s Canyon.
For her entire adult life (and probably most of her adolescence), Phoebe (Marie Lazzaro) has carried the pain of having her mother abandon their family without any explanation or closure. Her father Ben (the late Lawrason Driscoll, he’s outstanding) was left on his own to raise Phoebe and her brother Whit (Eric Jordan). She’s gotten by through some unrewarding jobs but that trauma has kept her from thriving in any real aspect of life. Early in the film, she gets a part time job as a bookkeeper for a bicycle shop. Despite not having much initial interest in cycling, the job helps unlock something inside of Phoebe she didn’t know she needs.
As a survival technique, Phoebe convinces herself that if her mother was a normal person, the only possible explanations for her vanishing are that Phoebe and/or Whit caused her to leave, or Phoebe’s father did. Phoebe chooses to hold her father responsible and has kept him from her life. There is a scene between Ben and Whit, where Ben tells his son something like “It’s hard when you love someone but they don’t want to love you back” that reduced me to tears. For what it’s worth, that seems to happen to me a lot these days. But Ben understands that he has fewer days in front of him than behind and he wants to make end of life arrangements with his two children. Whit is eager to help Phoebe and Ben reconcile, though he has his own demons to deal with and his motives may not entirely be altruistic. He tells people that he carries a flask (and drinks out of it often) to keep up appearances because he works in the wine industry, but he’s fooling no one. Phoebe, Ben, and Whit make up a dysfunctional family that is trying to put itself back together when no one really knows what they need from each other.
Shot entirely in Seattle, the movie has a sense of familiarity built in for Pacific Northwesterners but the emotional response I had felt was both universal and specific. It’s a movie that made me sad at times but hopeful overall.
I truly loved this movie.
Phoebe’s Father plays in the Northwest Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema from April 30 through May 16.