Animation is Film Review: Tangles finds beauty and laughter in dark times

I went into Tangles knowing that my tear ducts were likely in for a rough time. I have a pretty intense fear of/dread of aging, and by extension, any disease of the mind that causes a loss of self. Dementia, Alzheimer's, anything in that realm. I'm in my mid-thirties, still considered young by a lot of people and by most metrics, but it seems old to me. I feel so much younger inside, the same I felt a decade ago, maybe even longer. I dread the day when that starts to change, when the facts of my life start to feel slippery, when memory starts to fail me more than it works. We are, in many ways, the totality of our memories. Without them, who are we? Who do we become?

During the Q&A for Tangles at last night's Animation is Film screening (the film's LA premiere!), the moderator referred to Alzheimer's as The Worst Thing, and that feels right to me. And yet Tangles isn't just a profoundly impactful, emotional look at the ways Alzheimer's rocks Sarah Leavitt's family to its core, the way it pulls the rug out from under them and makes navigating life so much more challenging. It's also extremely funny, weird, even sexy. It takes in the whole picture, the moments that are directly related to family matriarch Midge's illness, and the moments that aren't. Even within the diagnosis and Midge's gradual decline, there are laughs to be had. Leavitt talked about how in the midst of such a hard time, her family was full of laughter. Sometimes because they felt like they were dying in side, and sometimes because what was happening was actually funny (like her mom trying to eat the votive candles at a wedding). It's important to be able to still find laughter and light in the midst of dark times -- it's like releasing a pressure valve, necessary so you don't explode -- and Tangles finds those laughs masterfully.

Directed by Leah Nelson and adapted from Leavitt's graphic novel of the same name, Tangles is the story of how Midge's Alzheimer's rocked Sarah's world, and her family's. The film has a disclaimer at the top that it's based on how Sarah remembers those events happening, and that he family may remember things differently. Isn't that what life is? All of us moving through it, sometimes going through the very same events, and having our own impressions and feelings and memories of them? Some of the facts may rhyme, but sometimes they don't, sometimes they're wildly different. During the Q&A, Sarah said the events depicted in the film fall into three buckets: things that actually happened and were in her book, things that actually happened and weren't in her book, and things that were made up for the movie. The book is, per Nelson, more a series of vignettes, so the film had to be molded into a more overall narrative shape, so it makes sense some things had to be created whole cloth (like the character Sarah working at an edgy queer magazine as an illustrator).

The panel in the graphic novel that served as the film's "North Star," as Nelson said, was one showing Sarah and her father post-diagnosis, the ground crumbling out from beneath them. This isn't a movie just about the facts of the disease, the story of what happened. It's about what it felt like for the family, and for Sarah specifically. We never go into Midge's mind -- the film doesn't want to guess at what it's like to be in a mind that's falling to pieces -- but we have lots of fantastical flights into Sarah's experience and feelings. The film's opening scene shows a young Sarah being creeped out by the ornate wallpaper in her room, which seems to move. Midge comes in and wields a flashlight like a lightsaber, fighting the monsters off, happy to be brave for the sake of someone she loves. The foreshadowing is strong with this one.

These scenes that touch off from the real world also have a neat visual distinction: it's the only time we get flashes of color in the movie. The animation is otherwise beautiful black-and-white, with a style that feels very graphic novel, comic-book. I love the characters' simple eyes (ovular black beads), the elegantly straight-on designs that give the fantasy sequences extra power, oomph. It's a real looker.

The story obviously does a great job of showing what it's like (or what it can be like -- this is just one version of this story, a story that affects countless people in countless ways) to go through a diagnosis like this. You see the early denial, the inching toward understanding, the resistance to medical intervention, the surrender. There's, hopefully, an inevitable moment in a person's life when they become the more parental figure to their parents, as scary and sad and topsy-turvy as that is. When Midge starts showing signs of decline, Sarah is the only one who seems appropriately alarmed. Maybe because she lives across the country, so it won't be a day-to-day reality for her? 

And life goes on. That's the cosmic joke of it all. While this horrible thing is happening, chipping away at the person you love, the person who protected you but no longer can even protect herself from falling out of bed, you have to keep living life, as much as you can. For Sarah, that means navigating a blossoming romance with uber-cool Donimo (not a typo) and taking on more responsibility at work, with an eye at illustrating for bigger publications. For her sister, it means planning a wedding as quickly as possible, because she desperately wants her mom to be there. It feels borderline absurd to be concerned about the everyday things like a job or dating in the face of The Worst Thing, but what choice do we have? There will always be Bad Things happening, sometimes closer to us than we want, and we have to still make room for The Good Things.

I would be remiss not to mention the stellar cast assembled here, helped along by having Seth Rogen as a producer on your movie, as Nelson noted during the Q&A. Indeed, Rogen has a fun supporting role (they even manage to get his iconic laugh in there, which got a big laugh from our audience). Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices Midge, beautifully capturing the decline of this bold, brassy woman into someone who's quiet, confused, often gently muttering. Abbi Jacobson plays Sarah, and captures all of the character's competing emotions perfectly -- the frustration, the woe, the joy. It's a brilliant performance. Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein, Wanda Sykes, and Bowen Yang are just some of the other names among the cast. It's a deep bench, and one where everyone is bringing their A-game.

I think the key to why this movie is so impactful, and so important, lies during the end credits. After the first bit showing all the actors and main contributors to the film, a message dedicating the film to Midge appears. But then, more names appear. Many more. And some of those names are family nicknames, some of them are in other languages. It reminds us (not that we necessarily need a reminder) how many lives are affected by Alzheimer's and dementia, how many families are rocked by those diseases. This may be the story of how Sarah and her family experienced their matriarch's illness, but it's also a universal story. And it gives everyone permission to find light, laughter, and community in the midst of hard times. It's the only way to get through.