The Rest Is Gravy
By Chris Shields
It Goes That Quick
Dir. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus, U.S., no distributor
In a perfect world, every family would have its own version of It Goes That Quick. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’s tender film captures the banality and the beauty of family with a cinematic flair that adds a distinct structural and artistic dimension to everyday conversations and events. The film functions as a kind of documentary hybrid, with real family members playing themselves and doing things they would presumably really do but for the camera. At the beginnings and ends of some scenes, we hear Connor’s and Stankus’s voices directing, or maybe more correctly, guiding, the action, but the result is far from fiction, alighting upon a special truth. And this truth is that family is funny and sad, unique and commonplace, and that time passes and so do people.
It Goes That Quick is broken up into six chapters that follow different pairings of family members. The result is a web of connections with Connor and Stankus in the middle of it all, yet largely unseen outside of hazy archival home videos and professional cinematographer Connor’s own gorgeously self-shot home movie footage. In Part I: Grandparents and Mother, Stankus’s grandfather is torn from a game of computer solitaire by a phone call from his daughter, Stankus’s mother, Andrea. She needs a ride, so her aged parents get ready (with grandmother taking time to apply a generous amount of perfume), hop in the car, and pick her up. On the way they discuss plans for the upcoming seder. When Andrea joins, she has her own unwelcome ideas about it. Grandmother explains that she’s “got to make a lot of gravy,” to which her daughter responds with exacerbation, “Who likes gravy?” It’s a moment of family irritation that will elicit laughter and a shudder of recognition.
Similarly in Part II: The Uncles, quotidian scenes reveal the more universally relatable. While shopping for a plant, Connor’s Uncle Mike is on the phone with his husband. He tells him, “[W]hen it comes to death, it is what it is, it’s a part of life, and people die.” Herein lies the beauty of Connor and Stankus’s film: in its totality it gives a shape and a grandeur to a collection of humorous and painful particulars that turn nebulous family connections into something perceptible. This idea is furthered by the film’s score: a collection of Chopin piano sonatas that give musical form to melodies that feel pulled from the romanticized ether of human memory, creating a contrapuntal dimension for the fleeting moments that might otherwise pass before our eyes without remark.
Connor and Stankus’s project began ten years ago with a short film featuring the latter’s grandparents titled The Backseat. For the next eight years the couple continued to film their family performing, in their words, “semi-scripted ‘scenarios’ from their daily lives.” While watching the married Connor and Stankus’s nakedly personal film, I recalled postmodern master John Barth’s 1982 novel, Sabbatical: A Romance. In that relatively minor work, the story of a married couple’s romance is told through the story of a sailing journey, and in Barth’s typical metafictional fashion, explicitly focuses on the mechanics of writing. Similarly, It Goes That Quick tells the story of a family and more abstractly a couple through the lens of Connor and Stankus’s shared filmmaking practice. Sprocket holes run along the left side of the frame as we watch home movie footage of their wedding, a trip to Paris, and images taken during Connor’s pregnancy. Connor handles the cinematography and Stankus the sound as they film their families, gazing on them through a love language of close-ups and wide shots that are sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply poignant. Connor and Stankus’s film shares stylistic and reflexive affinities with Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who (2020), but their film comes without the shocking family revelation of Sachs’s experimental documentary. Instead, what It Goes That Quick offers is their gracefully sculpted unsensational material.
The film culminates in Part VI: Everybody, with the seder that was being planned in Part I. After watching the home video footage from family parties years before throughout the film, we see the family together once again, much older and grayer. For anyone with aging relatives and good memories from the family gatherings of their childhood, it’s a touching and achingly bittersweet scene. There seems to be no remedy for melancholy that comes when we become acutely aware of the intractable passage of time, and Connor and Stankus’s film bravely confronts us with this reality. Connor’s Uncle says “it is what it is” earlier in the film, but It Goes That Quick doesn’t take the people who populate its gentle, fractured narrative for granted. Most of them are still here now, albeit older and in an increasingly shabby world. Through the compassionate lens of these filmmakers, their lives and their family become art.