Time Passages Review: Love Lost to Time & Covid-19

Kyle Henry’s Time Passages gently honours the filmmaker’s mother, while knowingly exploring how we interact with our own families’ pasts.

Chicago-based filmmaker Kyle Henry was caught in this dilemma. His dementia-stricken mother Elaine was in a care facility in Texas, and thus he could only visit her via remote video calls. All this happened while he was in the middle of collating images, home video and artifacts from his family archive. He blends these items, his recollections of his mother, and his own life into Time Passages, a heartfelt act of familial reckoning that will ring true with many a viewer.

The film opens with a birthday party for Elaine in her care home captured via camera phone. As her son sings to her from afar, the deeply personal stakes are laid down. Dementia eventually robs the sufferer of any real capacity to define themselves, and this fact drove Kyle to create a document of his mother long before Covid-19 hit. Time Passages is a collage of Elaine Henry’s life, with photographs charting her journey from girlhood, to college, to marriage and motherhood. The story her son creates is a moving one, and the reason it is so affecting is that it is universal. For every smile frozen in a photograph, there is a deeper and darker tale. Parental neglect and marital strife are commonalities in so many people’s stories, and to see them told here is reassuring.

Henry airs his family’s dirty laundry this way in an attempt to reinforce the weak foundations of his relationship with his mother. As with any parent-child relationship, theirs had its rough patches. Henry reveals that growing up gay in the American south was a challenging experience, and that it took his mother some time to accept her son for who he was. For the most part, Henry recounts all this simply with the backup of his family photos and paraphernalia. Time Passages stresses that the Henry family led a stereotypical white middle-class life, and the tragedy of it is that even comfortable existences come with heartbreaks. It’s not dissimilar to Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, but with more relatability and a greater sense of mission.

Driving this story is camcorder footage of the Henrys’ everyday goings-on, and conversations between various family members. Their polite honesty is endearing, with Elaine and the family telling their stories simply and clearly. In between, Kyle muses on the purpose of putting these moments together into a film. At one point, he posits these as subversions of Kodak’s mission to capture happy family moments. For all that, though, the scenes between the home movies are slick, and the whole enterprise is handsomely mounted. There are even scenes with models and stop motion that recall Rithy Panh’s work in The Missing Picture. Yet, the home movies and personal recollections are the high point of Time Passages. Elaine is as flawed as anyone else, but Elaine is charming and upbeat company. Footage of Elaine and her predeceased husband telling the story of their first date will bring smiles to the coldest heart. 

However, there is a self-awareness to Time Passages that denies it some edge. Few documentary portraits of familial illness can compare with the lo-fi ambition of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, and that film casts a long shadow that makes subsequent pretenders look quaint by comparison. The chasm between that film and the likes of Time Passages is underlined by scenes when Henry inserts himself into the movie. Using the confessional of film as a form of therapy, Henry impersonates his mother in some scenes in order to have deep conversations that he couldn’t have with his dementia-addled real mother. For all their insight, such scenes come across as manipulative, or at least trite. Still, Time Passages is intended as something therapeutic for the audience too. Henry is aware of the universality of familial pain, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. When Henry is finally able to visit his mother in person again, the moment is full of gentle heartbreak as mother and son share mask-and-gown-bound embraces.

Time Passages offers catharsis to filmmaker and viewer alike. Its relatability is its trump card, with identifiable moments of family strife inviting tears. Even if Kyle Henry occasionally can’t decide between telling his mother’s story or his own, both are now on the record, and the relationship between them is full of love and care. We can’t ask for much more than that between mother and son.

Time Passages will be released in select US theatres on January 31, 2025.