What They Had

Overstays its welcome, but the acting is terrific, and the screenplay sporadically excellent

Seventeen years ago, I was given the news of my grandmother's Alzheimer’s diagnosis. I was devastated for her. She was 68, young for such a thing and younger in spirit, sharp as a tack, a red-headed, heart-centered woman who demonstrated her Irish heritage in a work ethic and generosity of love that brought her to the highest levels of administration in, ironically, geriatric nursing.

I was perhaps more devastated for her husband, my grandfather. He adored her and had all his life. The__y were small town Illinois farm kids who grew up together and married young, and forty years and four kids later were still in the throes of the sweetest kind of love affair. They'd bicker and flirt over breakfast; she’d climb into his lap and kiss him all over; they were better together and never apart, and her diagnosis seemed like the cruelest end to such a love story.

[...]

I wrote What They Had as a means of working through this generational grief. I wrote it for myself, and for my mother, and for her brothers, to preserve for us a memory that I now understood we’d all eventually lose. I wrote it for all the reasons I had always written—to figure out things I did not understand, to find some workaround for loss, to find some order in things that felt un-orderly and unfair.

Making the film felt like cheating death. It was granting my grandparents new life, getting to know them better and deeper, as an adult rather than as a child. It was returning to Chicago, the place I left when I was fourteen but still feels like home. And it was reckoning with myself, the woman I’d become, holding up a mirror to determine how much that woman was serving me, serving other real women I knew, wondering what our culpability was for that, what kind of courage it might take to confront those things and step out on the other side.

• Elizabeth Chomko; "Filmmaker Lett...