Alma . Austin Chronicle . 03-30-98

Alma

DIRECTED BY: Ruth Leitman

REVIEWED: 03-30-98

Alma Thorpe, the subject of documentarian Ruth Leitman's Alma, suffers from mental illnesses that could be explained in a rather perfunctory manner by most any mental health professional. Fortunately for her audience, Leitman bypasses those facts for other, more rewarding insights, like Alma's unarticulated reliance upon her daughter Miss Margie, a staple of the Atlanta music scene, who ends up becoming the emotional and visual ballast of this complex, excellent documentary. At the film's beginning, after learning that her mother is once again mentally unstable to the point of hospitalization, Margie resolves to "leave my family to their own existence," a resolution that unravels by the film's end as Margie realizes, with no small amount of pain, that she can't leave her mother and once-abusive father to their own devices. Leitman is the filmmaker behind SXSW '96's Wildwood, New Jersey, which documents seaside New Jersey girls. Alma is the concatenation of many perceived, sometimes stereotypical, notions of Southern women. Thus, simply shooting the camera at Alma (and Margie) turns this documentary into a treatise on Southern girls, though "treatise" makes it seem as if hilarious moments do not arise amid all the pathos, moments that usually consist of Margie providing renditions of her mother's fantasies. Margie is Alma's producer and was present at SXSW screenings of the film, which made for a jarring union of the onscreen Margie and her role as the instigator of this documentary. Alma is a sad Southern specter, the damsel in distress who is also a forceful and manipulative woman, the type that fueled the imaginations of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote; Leitman no less poetically and eloquently mines the same territory.

--Claiborne Smith

Full Length Reviews
Alma

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