In 2014, I lost my mother to ALS. It was difficult because the disease caused us to lose her bit by bit and then all at once. In his documentary Time Passages, Kyle Henry charts the story of his mother’s decline into dementia during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But more than that, the film is a deep dive into the relationship between a son and his mother and asks the important question about what stories we should carry with us.
One of the key framing devices of Time Passages is the backdrop of Kodak. The film and camera company was a top advertiser during Kyle’s younger years, and his parents bought into the idea that every moment needed to be captured and documented. Kyle shares that his father, Richard, was the primary photographer for their family, capturing photos of his wife and five children through the years, while Kyle’s mother, Elaine, was the one to organize these memories into scrapbooks, creating a sense of order to the information.
The juxtaposition of a woman who creates order for the family’s memories succumbing to dementia is a poignant way of positioning the documentary. In one way, it shows the value of preserving memories since they will not always be something that we can verbalize as time passes. However, it also does an excellent job of showing how we cherry-pick what memories to preserve and how that can create an incomplete and even harmful record of a lifetime.
Much of Time Passages is Kyle trying to sort out his relationship with his mother. We see him interview both of his parents before his father passed away and before his mother began experiencing dementia. The story that they give about their decision to marry, despite being two people who never wanted to marry, was quite lovely. I don’t doubt that those were the memories that they had about it. What was interesting was how the retelling of their love story contrasted with Kyle’s memories of their marriage. He shares numerous memories of his mom coming to him with her concerns about her marriage and how she was feeling about that, which was often unhappy.
The documentary does this often: showing one kind of preserved memory and then contrasting it with another. What makes this film unique is that Kyle uses a number of exciting techniques to sort through his memories of some of the events that his mother documented as a way of getting to understand her better. He uses little wooden figurines to act out some conversations that he saw between his parents or between him and his mother. He uses various documents that his mother preserved to show how their family lived and contrasted them with the ways that others at the same time experienced American life. He includes voice messages that his mother left him after she moved into a memory care facility. He even conducts an interview with his mother, where he plays both the interviewer and interviewee, complete with a wig.
While there are truly some unconventional ways of presenting the story, they work to show his solemnity and sometimes playfulness in the way that he copes with the long process of losing his mother. They also give a sense of the isolation that he felt trying to figure all of this out while he was unable to be physically with his mother due to COVID visitation restrictions. Like many Americans in 2020, he was physically separated from his mother while she was in the memory care facility, and their only interaction was over FaceTime. We only see one in-person visit between Kyle and Elaine during the film, and even then, he is fully masked, even wearing gloves to avoid any contamination.
There are aspects of Time Passages that felt somewhat scattered. Kyle talked about coming out and what that looked like in his relationship with his parents. He addresses aspects of inequality in homeownership between white service members and black service members under the G.I. Bill. He touches on the way that caring for ailing parents rips away any financial stability that parents may have been trying to provide for their families. All are important issues, and all are tangentially related to the primary story that he is telling about him and his mom, but none felt like they were given the time necessary to really flesh them out, so they felt like a bit of a distraction from the primary story.
But overall, Time Passages is a touching tribute from a son to his mother. It highlights the complexity of those relationships while also showing the simplicity of the love that parents and children can have for one another. And while it does a good job of showing that our curated memories are not always the most accurate, it also shows how they can be a place of comfort when the end comes.
Time Passages is now playing in limited theaters.
Learn more about the documentary, including how to watch, at the official website for the film.
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