To the outside world, the Guthries seemed pretty ordinary. Ian was an accountant, a hard-working provider, and his wife, Ann, a former nurse, devoted herself to raising their four children and to looking after their house in the seaside town of Largs on the west coast of Scotland.
But there is no such thing as ordinary where families are concerned: every family has its emotional icebergs, its submerged stories, its hidden themes, its plots and subplots, its complexities. For the Guthries, the heart of the buried subplot was this: during a period when he worked in Africa in the 1980s, Ian had an affair and a child. When he came home to Largs, he left behind him in Djibouti a little African boy with the very Scottish name of Campbell.
What happened next was that Ann began to realise that Ian was hiding a secret. When he confessed the truth, the marriage ended – but it only ended on paper because the lives of Ann and Ian continued to be closely entwined for many more years, with the two eventually living together again. Not only that, once Campbell’s existence was acknowledged, he was put on a plane to Scotland and subsumed – at first for weeks at a time, eventually permanently – into the Guthrie clan, which by this point included grandchildren.
Karen Guthrie was the third child in the family; today a 45-year-old film-maker, she had long known that what was going on under her nose, in that Largs kitchen and sitting room, was the most intriguing story she had to tell. So she took her cameras back to Scotland and trained her focus on her parents and their ordinary – and yet extraordinary – journey. She started from who they had become and went back to who they had once been.
Compelling though she knew the story was, even she was not prepared for the twist that was to reveal a new secret in her family’s life and end up leading her to a shack in a town in northern Ethiopia.
To give it away would be a spoiler, but it lends Karen’s film – a 90-minute documentary currently being screened in London and elsewhere – a gripping and eventful narrative.
The twist was heaven sent for a film-maker, but it is in the minutiae of her parents’ existence that Karen’s film lives and breathes. What fascinated her, above all, was the subtext of family life: the emotions and happenings of so many years and history, half-remembered and half-acknowledged, that pervade every sentence and invade every domestic scene, not just in Largs but in every family home. “You have this territory, in a family, that you cannot broach,” she says. “So much is going on, yet so much of it is unspoken. What I wanted to do was use my camera to take my parents into this territory, to take them there and to find out what was hidden there.”
Astonishingly – and given the subject matter, and Ian’s character in particular, this really is astonishing – Ian and Ann comply. Perhaps only their daughter could have got them to open up like this: they are people who came of age in the 1950s, at a time when feelings were kept under wraps. But Karen comes right out with it and asks Ian: why did you go away? Why did you abandon your family – physically and emotionally, if not financially?
“My wife was doing an excellent job of bringing up the children,” says Ian, “and I was playing fast and loose in Djibouti.”
When a much younger woman found him attractive, he was flattered. Ann, meanwhile, muses, “I don’t think he has any idea how much damage he’s done.”
Now the film is going to show him, says Karen. “So be it,” says Ann.
Karen first had the idea of delving into her father’s story in 2008, and interviewed Ann then as the starting point. The footage from that conversation is open and candid: it was an excellent start. But three weeks later, disaster struck: Ann had a devastating stroke, which left her virtually paraplegic. For some time afterwards, with the family reeling at what had happened and struggling to bring Ann back home (and in a surprise move, Ian deciding to move back in with her to help care for her), Karen put her film on the back burner.
It was only when things settled into a new normality, with Karen spending four days every other week in Largs, sharing Ann’s care with her siblings, that the camera came out again. Ann’s presence, vulnerable yet strong, forceful yet weak, brought a new dimension to the story; what was clear was that the marriage was still being played out, across the kitchen in Largs, between Ann’s wheelchair and Ian’s desk, where he often worked with his back to his wife, absent and yet present, just as he had almost always been in the five decades when they seemed unable to live without each other, just as they had been unable to live together.
“I never expected my mother to need mothering,” Karen says in the film. “I’m stalling my own life, letting emails flood in unread. Mobile phone switched off – there aren’t any emergencies left for me now.”
She had thought it would be a trial, this return to her home town and the work – heavy physically and emotionally – of caring for her mother under the eye of her father, but it didn’t turn out like that. “In the end it was a privilege,” she tells me. “Every week I spent with her could have been the last and I just thought: I’m so lucky to have this time with her.”
Through the Guthries, we see the unexpected turns that family life brings – and the humour without which any family would be lost, especially in tough times. “We’re not running a snack bar here,” says Ian from his keyboard, as Ann muses on whether she would like another piece of toast.
There are the big funny themes too, like the fact that Ian – who spends much of his time complaining that his children aren’t getting on better in their lives, though he never seems to link any of it to his absence during their formative years – is now investing his hopes in Campbell, who he is encouraging to join the French Foreign Legion.
The kernel of Karen’s film is her father’s difficult, dark, complicated character. He is, in many ways, a tyrant: it’s obvious that the whole family has danced around him, never daring to confront him head on, for decades. The film is clearly Karen’s attempt to do just that, in a way that won’t splinter them all for ever. But she agrees that this is a portrait of a man, of his time and in his time, who simply had too much power within his family, as so many men did and some still do.
“His position of control within our family came from his economic position, but it was also about how he positioned himself emotionally. Because he was emotionally inexpressive and that made it hard for the people around him to be able to talk.”
In many ways there are no revelations from Ian himself: just as Karen did, we meet him through his actions (and especially in the film’s final twist).
Getting in close with her camera, says Karen, allowed her, in the end, to accept her father for who he is and to forgive him his faults. “He’ll never be an expressive person,” she says. “But now I know every pore on him, and I feel much closer to him. I can see all his flaws, yet I can still love him.
“People say, how come you’re not angry with him, after everything he did? But I’m not angry: I see him as a man who made some mistakes and yet who tried to do right by everyone – by both of the women in his life – and who probably because of that ended up doing right by neither of them. But he did try. He tried to do the decent thing and now I can see that, and I understand it.”
What comes through in the film is a child’s even-handedness, an offspring’s desire to see two opposing individuals in the best possible light; we see Ian’s humour and wit and cleverness and charm, and we see Ann’s devotion to her children, her common sense, her less schooled but razor-sharp intelligence and her unselfpitying self-sacrifice. What comes through, too, is the cycle of family life: after Ann has gone to hospital, where we see her in a bed with a grumpy-looking Ian still by her side, we see one of her grandchildren trying out her wheelchair, her chubby little hand resting where Ann’s age-worn, wrinkled hand once rested.
The credits have rolled now on Karen’s documentary, but the story goes on because there are never any endings in family life. Ann died in 2013; Ian is now 80; Campbell is 27 and lives in London. Karen lives in Cumbria, and feels enormously lucky, not only to have had that time with both her parents, but also to have been able to ask the sort of direct questions we’ve probably all wanted to ask, at times, of the people who brought us into the world, and whose relationship is endlessly fascinating to us.
• The Closer We Get is released now, thecloserweget.com
