Kathleen Chalfant Devastates in the Graceful, Dignified, Indelible Familiar Touch

Ache informs much of Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, a still, gentle film about the ravages of time told with uncommon grace and dignity. Ache, for a life that’s gone by, and respect, not just for those whose time is nearing its end but also for those who strive to make these last years dignified and peaceful. It is a film attuned to decline, not just to the pain it can cause, but to how it refracts memory, presence, and touch. Above all else, it’s a film acutely aware of memory’s place in a person’s sense of identity, how it can unfairly slip through hands desperate to hold on.
Kathleen Chalfant plays Ruth, a woman whose presence of mind is slipping; in fact, her sense of place and time seems to shift with the breeze. The film begins with a gentleman caller arriving at her sunlit home to share a pleasant lunch. An outing is planned, but she forbids him to reveal where. He obliges—because a gentleman, as she reminds him, never spoils a surprise. This exchange, unhurried and oddly distant, evolves into a duet of mistaken identity and delicate misremembrance. The man tells her he’s an architect. She, smiling, says her father is a carpenter and that the man should meet him someday. “I’d like that,” he says guardedly but warmly. Her hand lingers on his leg flirtatiously. Lunch comes to an abrupt end. Recollection hits: she’s married. Then comes the present crashing in with harsh clarity: she knows where they’re going and, embarrassingly, who this man is. Not a suitor, but her son, Steve (an emotionally tousled H. Jon Benjamin).
A confrontation at this moment in Familiar Touch would have been painful, taxing, and expected. Instead, what follows is Ruth’s abrupt transition from home to here, bringing its own hurt without resorting to emotional manipulation. Steve has taken her to a retirement community, its warmth embodied in Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith), an indefatigably kind nurse, and Brian (Andy McQueen), a resident doctor to whom Ruth immediately takes a liking. In a lesser film, Ruth’s age and condition would invite challenges from drama’s loftier, hackneyed tactics: dismissive doctors, rude and/or abusive staff, and a family that is too distant to visit and too distracted to help. Mercifully and refreshingly, Friedland’s gaze is clear and gracious, reassuring that Ruth is, and will remain, in good hands. Despite one more destructive lapse—Ruth tells Vanessa in front of her son that she never wanted children—Friedland never implies vindictiveness in Ruth, judgment in Vanessa, nor an absence of love in Steve. It’s a precarious moment executed with dramatic honesty, not strategy.
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