REELING THROUGH LIFE

Novelist and nonfiction author Ison (Rockaway, 2013) unspools a montage of images that illustrate how her thoughts and feelings were channeled through lives on the big screen.

Despite seven years as a screenwriter (Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead), the author freely admits she has little background in film studies, and she eschews an analytical bent, preferring the legerdemain of smoke and mirrors. True, artistic merit is not a prerequisite for a movie to exert influence, especially on the impressionable young mind, and movies did erect a platform for how Ison saw the world. The early chapters are rooted in her reactions to movies as seen through the eyes of a child or adolescent, which occasionally becomes a catalog of varied child-of-the-affluent neuroses. Readers may not be convinced that she was so precocious as a 6- or 12-year-old that she grasped the nuances of these movies at the time. Later chapters offer adult interpretations of films that shaped her, though it is not always clear when she is looking back or in the here and now. It may be churlish to label as “self-absorbed” a book based solely on the author and her experiences, but the confessional and navel-gazing aspects are very much a matter of taste and can get tiresome when contrasted with powerful recollections of her parents and perceptive takes on awakening female sexuality and romanticizing the writing life. Even sympathetic readers may weary of all the travails and catharses. By contrast, Ison is at her best when her self-awareness is administered from a slight remove. There are wonderful movies revisited here, as well as some dreary ones that blunt our pleasure. But all are mainstream entertainments (emphasis on melodrama) that tend to amplify and distort real life, risking superficial treatment.

Though well-written and engaging, this is basically a book-length aphorism, something discharged by Paddy Chayefsky in a single passage from Network.