So you think your high school reuion was uncomfortable...

#26: Prodigal Sons

This documentary is directed by Kimberly Reed who, in her youth, was voted most likely to succeed, was the star quarterback of her high school football team, was handsome and popular, and apparently the chief nemesis of her older, dumber, uglier, less athletic and (as if that weren't enough) adopted older brother named Marc. She returns for her 20th high school reunion as a post-operative transsexual and stunning lesbian with girlfriend in tow who is still smarter, more popular, prettier, and more likely to succeed than her now literally brain-damaged older brother.

Poor Marc just can't get a break.

The strangeness of the high school reunion (which, despite whatever stereotypes you may harbor about Montana, actually goes off without a hitch) is just the beginning. It gets stranger as the story veers away from what must have been it original conceit (what happens when you really are the most changed at your high school reunion?) to just hanging on as Marc becomes increasingly unstable and a brotherly rivalry--clearly left far behind by the victor who was only dimly aware of it in the first place, wrapped up as she was in her ideal life and pantomime of perfection--metastasizes into full blown hate.

The first-person urgency of this documentary wears a bit thin and if Kimberly is as narcissistic as this film suggests then some of my sympathies certainly lie with the difficult to like Marc. Nevertheless, this is a curious and engaging story.

The tag line really says it all: " A brotherly rivalry between a man and a woman . . . and Orson Welles "