Canadian cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s unique visual storytelling is deftly and stylishly translated to the big screen in Tangles, an honest-to-goodness and highly influential film adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. Leavitt’s memoir, which chronicled her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease with tenderness and unique humor, has become a touchstone for many who endure the same brutal rite of passage as her loved ones. Co-written with an author and largely maintaining the visual and narrative specificity of the text, Leah Nelson’s frank, funny, and increasingly heartbreaking adult animated feature is an impressive debut for the director, and deserves to do the same.
Featuring key roles from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, and Bryan Cranston, as well as a cameo from producer Seth Rogen, the unique and exceptional voice ensemble of Tangles, which will premiere in Cannes’ non-competitive special screening section, is a further selling point and is sure to pique the interest of distributors and streamers with an eye toward prestigious animation. Additionally, LGBT-focused buyers and festival programmers should be drawn to the film’s proud and specific grounding in Leavitt’s queer life and identity, with a well-written subplot of a formative lesbian romance an uplifting counterpart to the close-knit family tragedy that unfolds elsewhere.
One major change from the original was that the story was moved from Vancouver (Leavitt and Nelson’s hometown) to the United States. This is perhaps also to more clearly depict the growing physical and mental divisions in the protagonist’s life. Here, 20-something Sarah (Jacobson) is caught between the shores. While her family home is in a sleepy suburb of Maine, she has carved out a niche for herself in San Francisco’s vibrant queer scene, working as a receptionist and occasional illustrator for a trendy alternative weekly, and leading a busy social life centered around lesbian nightclubs and straight-up political demonstrations. The year is 1999, and the city’s evolution into an almost untouchable high-tech city is underway, but not yet complete.
An aspiring artist and cartoonist, Sarah’s loose, jagged, semi-realistic drawings reflect her perpetually rapt and excited worldview, and as a result define the film’s spirited, witty 2D animation style, executed primarily in sharply nuanced black and white, with sporadic highlights of color (often bright purples and magentas) to emphasize core memories, leaps of imagination, or heightened emotion. Although art director Mandy Wickens doesn’t specifically imitate Levitt’s less refined aesthetic, the film deftly conveys a spontaneous, hand-drawn, illustrative rhythm in keeping with the sensibilities of its characters, who at times articulate rather than express their feelings, thus giving “Tangles” more than just a decorative reason for its medium.
It is in San Francisco that Sara is able to express herself most fully, and surrounded by like-minded friends, colleagues, and Donimo (Samira Wiley), a terrifyingly cool but vulnerable Zen motorcyclist, Sara begins, to her own surprise, a passionate relationship. A family trip to Maine is not an ordeal of any kind. Sarah is loved and accepted by her liberal-minded academic parents, Midge (Louis-Dreyfus) and Rob (Cranston), and her younger sister, Hannah (Beanie Feldstein), but sharp domestic details and childhood flashbacks paint a picture of the supportive family environment that nurtured our heroine’s intelligence and personality.
However, on one such trip, Sarah noticed Midge’s unusual behavior. Things like leaving the iron on, misuse of words, and clever defensive reactions when observing these mistakes. Now in her mid-50s, Midge is busy and content with life. Dementia wasn’t on anyone’s list of pressing concerns, but Rob thinks stress may be behind these personality abnormalities. But the ostensibly recreational vacation to Mexico that Sarah uses as an opportunity to introduce her parents to Donimo only highlights symptoms that doctors eventually diagnose as early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
And this story, like many other similar stories in life and cinema, can only go in a terribly sad direction, as the disease steadily erodes Midge’s memory, personality, and sense of self, and her loved ones gradually lose the woman they have known. Louis-Dreyfus plays Midge’s voice beautifully through every shift in consciousness, from the bright, empathetic guardian Sarah returns to in her childhood memories, to the hurt, angry woman who lashes out at her unstoppable deterioration, to the foggy echo of her former self, sometimes aware of the love that surrounds her, but otherwise not so much.
But despite the sadness that characterizes and mars Tangles, it is not a depressing film. Warm, detailed family observation and bittersweet humor as Midge’s daughter and husband slowly figure out how to continue living in the midst of her death. The proceedings largely follow the zigzags of Sarah’s own unstable mental state, which at times veers into nightmarish absurdity. An effective running gag depicts the PA system broadcasting her own more desperate thoughts on one of her many cross-country flights. And at times, it plunges into realistic clarity and wistful nostalgia. Tangles is a film that subtly but unobtrusively attunes to the challenges of living with dementia and those living with it, and the special moments of emotional connection during those struggles.
