“All Saints Day” Puts the Bond of Family to the Test
Kitchen sink realism is the British arts movement that was born out of the neorealism that was coming out of Italy. It’s a style of film, theater, and other art forms that focused on the reality of the working class of the era. While playwright Julianne “Jules” Homokay’s All Saints Day in the Old Colony takes place in Massachusetts, the essence of the story feels at home, no pun intended, with the genre of these kitchen sink realism stories. Director Matt Aaron Krinsky adapted Homokay’s play into a film, All Saints Day, without losing the truthful nature of the work.
All Saints’ Day is the Christian holy day that honors the saints in heaven. It’s a day of remembrance for those who came before. For the fractured family at the center of All Saints Day, it makes sense that they find themselves in the same room for the first time in years. When they were children, the eldest brother, Kier (Don Swayze), was put in an impossible position. Without present parents, Kier gave up his life to raise his brothers Mickey (Chad Doreck), Ronan (Jeff Berg), and one other, whose presence is never seen. These siblings also have a sister, Fiona (Aly Trasher), who Kier made the difficult choice to give up for adoption as a young girl. After the life he’s led, Kier is slowly drinking himself to death, so Ronan calls on all the siblings to host an intervention.
Often, when plays are adapted into films, they can’t seem to shake the theatrical aspects of their source material. Dialogue comes across as too stilted; too much like a monologue and less like the free-flowing conversation we expect in movies. All Saints Day doesn’t have those stumbling blocks. In truth, the fact that this might have been a play didn’t even come to mind while watching. The film does have some hallmarks of a stage show, in the sense that it’s mostly one location with a select few characters, but the movie never feels small or hindered by it. It’s a pressure cooker of a family dynamic that is so far from being okay.
Kier, Mickey, Ronan, and Fiona all love each other, but it’s like the quote from Lady Bird when Lady Bird asks her mom, “But do you like me?” The love that binds these siblings together is never called into question, but do they like each other? If they weren’t related, would any of them have anything to say to each other? Kier is drinking himself to death, Fiona is a bartender, Ronan is a janitor, and Mickey is a priest. Then there’s the fifth sibling, another brother who never makes an appearance. It’s hard to know which choice is the right one for these siblings. Are some of them better off for having left? What about those who stayed? All Saints Day paints no one as, well, a saint, but instead shows real humans wrestling with difficult choices about people they would give up the world for. These are not trivial relationships for the siblings, no matter how fragmented they are, but it takes real effort to repair what went wrong.
All Saints Day is kitchen sink realism done right. It can veer to the melodramatic at times, but the performances from the main core of actors make the film feel like the viewer is a fly on the wall of this explosive reconciliation. An under-the-radar indie gem, All Saints Day is a portrait of a family that exposes warts and all in the hope of forgiveness.
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