The Cathedral Review: A Cool, Intensely Textural Look at a Family in Crisis

On paper, Ricky D’Ambrose’s autobiographical The Cathedral sounds like a relatively conventional coming-of-age movie, tracking the childhood of a boy from the late 1980s, when he’s born, to the early aughts, when he goes to college with an interest in filmmaking. But there’s no sense here of a single path awaiting discovery, as D’Ambrose understands formation to be in constant flux. D’Ambrose dramatizes people who look back on their lives and belatedly understand certain moments to have been profoundly formative. “Coming of age” isn’t a convenient third-act dictate, but an ongoing accumulation of small starts and stops, of triumphs and mistakes and emotional wounds that heal into scar tissue.

Nearly an hour into this 87-minute film, D’Ambrose offers something like a statement of artistic purpose. The narrator (Madeleine James), who has a habit of saying what the characters cannot bear to articulate, describes the appeal of filmmaking to the 13-year-old D’Ambrose surrogate, Jesse (played at this age by Robert Levey II): “The many hours of moving images Jesse stored inside a cabinet in Lydia’s home reflected less an interest in memory than in measure. For the great distance that opened up between Jesse and the world on the eve of his adolescence could now effectively be scaled by videotape and light.”

The Cathedral, a collection of moments that resemble less conventionally molded scenes than poetic shards of memory, is a work defined by this sort of aesthetic. D’Ambrose allows the past to feel intensely present and alive in its sense of openness and uncertainty. Piercingly small and detailed moments accumulate to offer a portrait of a family in crisis against the backdrop of an America in a state of turmoil that continues to ripple into contemporary life. D’Ambrose boils his family’s vast heartbreaks, disappointments, and resentments down to tangible, singular images, occasionally breaking the cool objectivity of his touch with bursts of melodrama that cauterize the unprocessed emotion roiling under the surface of domestic life.

At the start of the film, the death of Jesse’s uncle, who was shunned by the family for having AIDS, is represented by a religiously charged close-up of a hand (the family is Catholic), turned upright facing the ceiling, on a hospital bed. We will never see another part of the man’s body. Outside of the narration, he will never be referred to again, and his rejection haunts the narrative as an unprocessed crime of the past. Much later, when we hear of the death of Jesse’s maternal great-grandmother, Josephine (Candy Dato), we see no funeral, hear no elaborate speeches, though we’re afforded a close-up of one of those heartbreakingly banal compartmentalized lunches that they serve in retirement homes.

A source of contention among a family who fought over who gets stuck with her, Josephine’s marginalization and death are ultimately expressed via a close-up of a meal we’ve seen dozens of times throughout our lives and barely noticed, though now it’s newly charged with emotional weight. Meanwhile, recurring images of windows graced by sunlight evoke an ongoing longing on Jesse’s part for transcendence—for a sense of order, even if D’Ambrose is too much of an artist to give us false closure. The Cathedral abounds in a head-spinning number of such resonant images, as D’Ambrose contextualizes his familial demons via the scale of quotidian objects, and of faces that frequently reveal more than they mean to.

The editing, also by D’Ambrose, pointedly lacks the invisible sense of flow to which commercially minded productions aspire. The film’s images, many of which are close-ups emphasizing just how much we aren’t seeing or remembering of any given situation, seem to exist onto themselves, as a collected synecdoche of a river of memory as well as representations of isolation. Existing parallel to these images are footage from real-life news shows that establish major events that casted a pall over these shifting time periods, including footage from Operation Desert Storm, 9/11, and other disasters.

This isolation is also reflected by the behavior of the characters, who, with several jolting exceptions, speak in an unaffected manner that recalls Robert Bresson’s “model” technique. As in Bresson’s work, the lack of overtly displayed emotion achieves an intensifying rather than distancing effect; you’re aware of the emotion the characters are suppressing, which peaks in anyway in the glances of sadness, anger, and frustration that are evident during birthdays, confirmations, weddings, and graduations. These emotions, in a few shattering sequences, eventually explode to the fore, particularly near the finale. The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.

D’Ambrose clearly loves this family, though he sees it as a matrix of grudges. Josephine, speaking in a sadly elegant manner that suggests the hard-won dignity of someone who knows she’s widely seen as beside the point, is abused by her son. Jesse’s father, Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), a printer who falls into hard time during the digital revolution, resents the more prosperous family of Jesse’s mother, Lydia (Monica Barbaro), especially Lydia’s father, Nick (Mark Zeisler), who’s as bitter and hard-headed in his way as Richard.

The women, namely Lydia and her sisters, are seen as the nurturers, the negotiators, the founts of understanding in a world of men who’re stunted and haunted by demons, especially their own mothers. Though, of course, they aren’t infallible. One of Lydia’s sisters, Billie (Cynthia Mace), is ostracized over the feud over Josephine, and her devastating dismissal is staged with an offhanded gracefulness that’s worth of the finale of Carol Reed’s The Third Man—in a long shot, as the lovely weather beholds the tortured women without comment.

Many influences clearly run through The Cathedral, but its achievement is singular. D’Ambrose points the way toward doing period films that actually capture periods, utilizing documentary footage to establish a setting that’s complemented with minimal props that, especially for adults, suggest totems to unreconciled, unfinished, now unreachable worlds.

This minimalism is far more evocative, and far less distancing, than the expensive and glossed-over pageantry of many prestige Hollywood productions. The film contrasts fascinatingly with Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, as both are intensely textural works that portray the macro of society via the micro of fleeting human gestures and possessions and news programs that exist as white noise at first only to achieve profound meaning in hindsight. They are reminiscences charged with that old adage: “You can never go home again.” Fittingly, then, the final word spoken in The Cathedral is “goodbye.”