Review: Leaving Home, Coming Home Is a Searing Portrait of Robert Frank

Shot in 2004 but shelved after its subject deemed it too personal, Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank follows the photographer as he retraces the locations of some of his photos, offering a rumination on New York City’s gentrification as well as the peace that Frank found when he moved with his wife, sculptor June Leaf, to Nova Scotia. Frank also discusses his iconic photography book The Americans and the various films he made about his family, particularly his troubled son, Pablo. One may initially wonder what Frank could’ve objected to in terms of content, especially given the frankness of his own work, but Leaving Home, Coming Home exudes a cumulative force and a lingering gravitas. It gradually becomes apparent that Frank is revealing more of himself than he intends to.

Throughout Leaving Home, Coming Home, director Gerald Fox emulates, to a degree, the raw, volcanic poetry of Frank’s own films, fashioning a loose and rough-and-tumble document of a gifted man who’s aged into a gruff curmudgeon who’s more sentimental than he appears to be. Frank’s voice is a thing of beauty, still inflected with his Swiss origins while colored with the experience and weariness of, at the time, nearly 80 years of life. From a glance, Frank resembles the sort of grizzled coot you might see at a diner talking about the “good ‘ol days” before work, until that voice begins to describe the shifting phases of America as Frank perceives them. At that point, the man reveals himself to be an artist.

In terms of Frank’s collaboration with Fox on Leaving Home, Coming Home, the photographer’s conflict is astutely summed up by an early moment in the film. Frank offers his thoughts on a subject and Fox runs out of film and asks the man to repeat what he just said, directing him like an actor. Frank fumes, saying that this is “bullshit,” and, while he doesn’t directly articulate this anxiety, one gets the feeling that Frank resists the idea of making a film in which he’s seen as an aging lion in winter. He understandably finds the idea contrived, and Fox honors Frank by including the blown take, which is probably more revealing of each collaborator’s methods and mindsets than whatever Frank was saying to begin with.

Leaving Home, Coming Home isn’t a conventional documentary, outlining Frank’s childhood, pilgrimage to America, creative blossoming, and so forth in neat, digestible arcs. Instead, Fox achieves a sense of simultaneousness and randomness that’s truer to real life. In one memorable scene, Frank visits Coney Island to find the location of a famous shot from The Americans, eventually talking to a tourist about their respective career paths. (Casually, in the background of some of these images, Fox channels the loneliness of Frank’s beach photographs, in which sunbathers lay in isolation.) At another point, we hang out with Frank as he watches June complete a metallic motion sculpture of a pregnant woman. Frank and June’s conversation, in which they talk of the space they give one another, and of the unpredictable stimulation of life with a respective artist, manages to powerfully evoke long-term cohabitation, and creation, within a matter of minutes.

The film’s most painful passages pertain to Frank’s relationship with Pablo and perhaps explain why he was uncomfortable with this project in the first place. Suffering from mental illness, Pablo committed suicide in his 40s, and Frank made films about his son’s problems and about their tormented relationship, which suffered under Frank’s work ethic. Fox samples Frank’s films, and one is left with an uncomfortable impression regarding the classic riddle of the relationship between documentarians and their subjects: Should the former film their sources of concern or intervene to improve the latter’s circumstances? Fox doesn’t pretend to have an answer, as filmmaking is, for Frank and for many others, a fashion of attempting to reach someone, though it’s inescapably on the artist’s own terms. For his part, Frank doesn’t let himself off the hook, and he speaks of his guilt with a searing confessional intimacy.

Leaving Home, Coming Home, though, has a peculiar problem: It’s so good that one wants more of it. Cocksucker Blues, Frank’s infamous and largely unseen documentary about the Rolling Stones, who objected to the filmmaker’s portrait of them (something to which Frank can now obviously relate) is too fleetingly discussed. And more time could’ve been devoted to simply allowing the audience to see Frank’s photographs, which are haunting documents of the beauty and loneliness of life, whether in the city, the American South, or the tranquil landscapes of Nova Scotia. Beautiful loneliness, as Leaving Home, Coming Home suggestively reveals, is a texture that Frank knows all too well.