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Morgan Dews' documentary "Must Read After My Death" is as plainly beautiful and unsparing in its intimacy as it is painfully tragic and compelling. All of the undiluted behaviors of human beings are paraded with such a dignified nakedness. Dirty laundry is aired out to dry and the stench of much of it is suffocating. The documentary is a compilation of hundreds of hours of home videos and hundreds of letters by Allis (last name not revealed) about her marriage to Charley, an adulterer who for many months at a time is in Australia doing business and dancing the months away with a variety of women whom he forges intimacies with. It just so happens that Allis, who lives in a big house in Connecticut also has her and Charley's four children (Bruce, Anne, Doug and Chuck) to take care of. " . . . I'm not a person to sit around and sew and decorate and paint and do things like that. I am not a housewife. I have never been a housewife", words from Allis that begin the documentary, which follows her vivid recordings from 1961 right through to the 1990's.

We learn much more than we hope to about the trials and turmoil of what is clearly a wretched family life for all involved, especially Allis. Sometimes shrill, other times sobering but most times rarely tender or saccharine-feeling as its distant feature film cousin "Revolutionary Road", "Must Read" is always electric viewing if not an enjoyable experience. Mr. Dews pares down the hundreds of hours of recordings into a slender 76 minutes. Many of the recordings hadn't been officially or fully disclosed to Allis's family members until just after Allis's death in 2001. The tapes detail an eldest child who runs away, a developmentally-disabled son, an angry and vengeful older son, and a mother who just wants to fly the coup for ten minutes of freedom. As we watch we feel that we ought not be witnesses -- perhaps the voyeuristic intrusion on the family's personal affairs is a little too much for most, but we are forced to be introspective about the nature and fragility of our own family household structure. "Must Read", which opened today in New York City at the Quad Cinema and nationwide in the U.S. via Gigantic Digital, online at (www.giganticdigital.com), opens next Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Sunset 5.

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