Charlie's worth the wait...

The is the slickest, most mature and most watchable of Jim van Beber's films to date. Watching it for the third time, I had a similar feeling to watching Jim Jarmusch's 'Stranger than Paradise' many years ago - this is an independent director - in the true sense of the word - poised on the brink of bigger things, and this is the film that could push him through the door into mainstream acceptance. Whether he survives it intact, or ends up like Jarmusch remains to be seen...'Charlie's Family' or 'The Mason Family' as it now appears to be called, has been a very long time in coming, and is possibly one of the most eagerly awaited and talked about independent films ever made. As such, it has had a terrifying level of expectation attending it, and a pre-release hype that any major Holywood studio would kill for...Has it lived up to this hype and expectation? In my opinion, yes...It is slick (in a good way) whilst still maintaining that raw, 'on-the-edge' quality that one expects from Van Beber...Re-telling the 'true story' of Charlie Manson and his hippy 'family' is, for a filmaker, as difficult a task as re-making 'The Sound of Music'...The tale is so familiar, and so over-worked by the media, that it's hard for any prospective audience to get past the lingering after-taste of a sucession of bad TV movies and 'true crime' documentary reconstructions...Before the first frame appears on the screen you're already fighting audience apathy...And yet, 'The Manson Family' manages both to stick to the facts of the events that we're all so familiar with, and inject those bare bones with a real, colourful vibrancy and freshness...Like 'The Manson Family Movies', there's lots of 'candid' scenes of Charlie and the girls, and the goings on at the Spahn Ranch, from dope smoking, acid-fuelled orgies, 'love 'n' peace' preaching and foot-washing to the later guns, knives, creepy-crawling and paranoia-fuelled target practice. These are brilliantly intercut with the actors, older now, and still in their various states of imprisonment, many having become 'born again' Christians, recalling their versions of events with the benefits of hindsight and somewhat selective memories. Van Beber manages to shift the focus away from Charlie, for once, by the technique of having a (rather slim) back-story in which a modern-day TV journalist is cutting together a film of contemporary interviews with the surviving members of the Family. Into this journalist's mouth Van Beber puts his agenda - Charlie's been done over and over - what he's interested in here is the rest of them, the 'normal' kids who came from all over America and, eventually, were willing and happy to kill for a man and a philosophy that they believed in...This allows the '1st person' interviews with and memories of Sadie, Squeaky, Snake, Tex, Linda and the rest to be juxtaposed - sometimes jarringly - with Van Beber's constructed 'fantasy' scenarios of the actual events...The TV journalist is, meanwhile, being targeted by a modern day gang of Mansonites - the 'weakest link' in the whole film - who spend their time hanging out in a scary basement, wearing 'weird' clothes, taking drugs, planning their own killing spree, and listening to Jim Jones' speeches...Overall, incredibly, the unlikely package comes together and works, really pulling you in to the story of what was, after all, just another mildly anarchistic, counter-culture community of slightly f*#!ed-up kids until the events at Cielo Drive happened in August 1969...It's a great little film which proves that Van Beber is maturing as a filmmaker, and that he can handle a bigger budget, better cast and higher production values without losing his 'edge'...Whether he can continue to do so should Holywood start calling will remain to be seen...Watch out for this man, though...Incidentally, Van Beber himself makes a great Bobby Beausoliel, both the younger hippie version and the older, grey-haired Buffalo Bill-style hippie of later years!