I got the call when I was at the gym. My wife said, “It’s time.”
But I was at the gym. It was three weeks early. It couldn’t be time.
It was.
About 28 hours later, after events that could fill 5 other posts, my son, Henry, was born. The hospital staff made me go home at midnight. Staggering up the steps to my apartment, I saw my latest Netflix orders. On top was Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander.
I thought, “Well, here’s one way my life has just changed. I don’t see having the need/time to watch a 3 1/2 hour Swedish movie anytime soon.”
But you never know how things will turn out.
I can remember where I saw all my favorite movies, from The Passion of Joan of Arc at MOMA, to McCabe and Mrs. Miller at the (lost and lamented) Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place, to The Silence of the Lambs at the Yonkers Central Avenue multiplex.
I saw Fanny & Alexander sitting in a rocking chair, with my one-week-old son asleep on my shoulder.
For those of you who haven’t experienced it, the first few weeks of having a child (at least your first) are terrifying and inexpressibly exhausting. My wife, Blair, would get up every few hours to feed Henry. At first, being the post-Alan Alda sensitive type guy that I am, I would get up with her. But we quickly realized that it was far better, practically speaking, for at least one of us to get some sleep. So I slept. We’re only talking 4 or 5 hours a night, but it was a hell of a lot more than my wife was getting.
I quickly learned that there was one gift I could give to my wife to help her. When Henry awoke early in the morning, I could take him. He could sleep on me while Blair got at least enough sleep to function through the morning. So one morning I took Henry into the living room, fed him his bottle, and let him fall asleep on my shoulder.
But here’s the thing - once he’s asleep, I couldn’t move. Not to eat, not to pee, nothin’. What to do with the hour/90 minutes that Henry was asleep on my shoulder?
Ingmar Bergman to the rescue!
So the next morning, as I took Henry into the living room, I cued up Fanny & Alexander. And as he slept on my shoulder, for three consecutive mornings, I watched it.
I will never know how much of my reaction to the film was due to the circumstances under which I saw it. I would be very eager to hear other people’s feelings about it. But to me, Fanny & Alexander was the most gorgeous movie I’d ever seen.
Mind you, I’m a snob about seeing movies in a theatre. Every other one of my favorite films is one I saw in a theatre. But this time I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. It was all so beautiful, each image more stunning than the last – a dead doe lying in a creek bed, the hundreds of candles glowing in the plush crimson parlor at Christmas, a man rushed in a cart down cobblestone streets as his life slips away. It was staggering.
Each morning my viewing would end the same way. Henry would stir, then cry. I would reach down and stop the film. On the third day, the sun had just risen as the credits rolled. The light was streaming through the trees outside my window as Henry woke. It was a kind of perfection.
Sometime in the next few years, one of New York’s revival houses will screen Fanny & Alexander. I will be there, with my wife by my side. Maybe someday I will even be see it with Henry. But however grand the theatre, it will never be as beautiful as those mornings when I saw it for the first time.
