Review: The Unicorn Captures the Intersection Between Art and the Quotidian

The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.

The Unicorn
Photo: Aonbheannach Productions

Widely recognized as the first openly gay country album, 1974’s The Unicorn attracted a cult following in the 1990s without altering the life of the eccentric Peter Grudzien. The singer continued as an elderly man to live in his childhood home in Queens with his nearly 100-year-old father, Joseph, and his schizophrenic twin sister, Terry, using their family dramas as inspirations for music that was never assembled into another album. Near the beginning of the documentary The Unicorn, text tells us that filmmakers Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty followed the Grudziens between 2005 and 2007, interviewing and regarding them as they performed their daily rituals. Filming the Grudziens as they grew decisively unhinged, Dupuis and Geraghty display mighty empathy and a piercing kind of artistic patience, shunning conventional narrative so as to linger on moments of casual human revelation. The Unicorn is an atmospheric document of living on the fringes, rendering its subjects’ despair and anger with a lucidity that suggests transcendence.

Capturing the intersection between art and the quotidian of tortured private lives, the film recalls Grey Gardens and Crumb. Like the subjects of those documentaries, the Grudziens have retreated into seclusion, and their demons offer a commentary on several of this country’s shameful pockets of history. Peter and Terry nonchalantly talk of the number of times they received shock therapy, and Peter tells of being advised to steer clear of his propensity for music as well as the true nature of his sexuality. Yet Peter, a proud iconoclast and defender of gay rights with a Confederate flag hanging in his bedroom, also defiantly acknowledges the positive effects of his shock therapy, saying it shook him out of depression for a year. (One of the many tensions driving The Unicorn is the impression that Peter is an unreliable narrator, driven by both an addled mind and a conscious urge to tend to his own mythology.)

The decay of the Grudzien home, a vividly punishing yet comfortingly homey place of leaks and clutter, suggests a metaphor for the eroded idealism of the United States. Joseph, an ex-marine, worked in coal mines as a child and wryly states at one point that he lost his job due to social crusaders protesting working conditions for children. He was a stout, old-fashioned working man who built a nuclear family only to see it curdle, partially due to his traditionalist’s inability to weather his children’s oddness and insanity. We’re pointedly never told what happened to Joseph’s wife, who’s seen in family photos and comes to suggest a phantom from a romantic past. Yet how romantic is even this past? Terry’s face is often twisted in misery even as a child, with Peter standing alongside her poignantly smiling—a gesture that contextually suggests an attempt to put a bright spin on their affairs.

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The Unicorn is rich in personal and social texture, though Dupuis and Geraghty never condescendingly utilize the Grudziens as symbols for their themes. The filmmakers truly see the people in front of them, and for this The Unicorn earns its similarity to Grey Gardens and Crumb. Its sobriety and clarity of vision serves to lace a bleak story with a shard of hope. Peter, Terry, and Joseph are oddballs, but they all offer poetic and touching ruminations on their lives, with Dupuis and Geraghty’s cameras affording them a cathartic opportunity to be heard.

Terry is the most heartbreaking of the three, describing her loneliness and tragedy with a matter-of-factness that often illuminates universal human need through the prism of her own experience. (Whether she knows it or not, Terry is also an artist.) At one point, she discusses the challenges of finding love. For one thing, Terry says, you have to be able to cross the street—a line that attains a metaphorical undertow in regard to how we must be willing to risk ourselves for connection, though, in Terry’s case, the sentiment also underscores a practical element of the constrictions of her paranoia. Clad in pasty makeup and a blond wig, with a face that’s been through several cosmetic surgeries, Terry suggests a kabuki demon, and her intimidating presence contradicts her visceral need for acceptance. She’s a woman in a prison.

Terry hates herself for her differences from other people, while Peter seems to embrace his outsider status—a gift that his obsession with country music has granted him. We hear quite a bit of Peter’s music over the course of the documentary, and it does have a rough and personal quality that suggests un-crystallized talent. Peter spends his days fiddling with his musical gadgets, smoking his pipe, and playing music, all as Dupuis and Geraghty survey him at length, searching his face for indications of his emotional climate while also simply enjoying the pleasure he takes, like many artists do, from engaging in a ritualistic daily routine. When various factors threaten the Grudziens’ existence, such as a scary hanger-on named Billy and family members who understandably try to place Peter and Joseph in an assisted-living community, one has become so tethered to Peter’s psyche as to feel defensive of him, sharing his selfish, irrational, and moving need to have his one-and-only home remain intact.

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With The Unicorn, Dupuis and Geraghty have ferociously captured the realm of an artist, leeching it of uplifting simplifications. Peter’s art is understood by the filmmakers to have in some sense preserved his sense of self in the face of horrible obstacles, but his interior realm has a price, paid by Joseph, a benefactor who comes to resemble something like Peter’s captive, and by Peter himself, who pares his life down to a set of behaviors that potentially ward off damnation as well as ecstasy. (Unlike Terry, Peter seems reconciled to having no romantic life.) Dupuis and Geraghty’s documentary illuminates, then, how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.

Score: 
 Director: Isabelle Dupuis, Tim Geraghty  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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