REVIEWS
Rick Rawlins is a successful graphic designer who has, for half a century, has kept half of a delicate sugar egg that he received as an eight-year-old at another child’s birthday party in Washington state in 1970. He is also one of the fascinating subjects of Objects, a magnificent new documentary from Vincent Liota, about the meaning we find in the inanimate.
You probably have a lot of questions: What is a sugar egg? Why has Rawlins held onto it? Why does this sound like something I would hear about on public radio? When you learn Rawlins’ reason for keeping the egg, you— or at least I— recognize it as completely reasonable and justified, as well as piercingly relatable. Of course, I’m one of those weirdos who, like Rawlins and Liota, believes that objects hold history and meaning, at least in the hands of a person who recognizes their value. Someone asks in the film if a pencil is more valuable if Albert Einstein has held it. If your answer is “of course,” Objects is very much a movie for you.
The film, which is now playing at the Heartland International Film Festival in Indianapolis, clocks in at just over an hour, but elegantly packs in decades of memories and stories. Besides Rawlins, we spend time with deadpan-funny author Heidi Julavits, whose interest in a tan camel crewneck sweater leads her to investigate the life and stuff of a French actress, Isabelle Corey. We also meet Robert Krulwich, a longtime friend of Liota who was a science correspondent for NPR and previously co-created and co-hosted Radiolab. He is perhaps less known as the proud owner of several leaves of dead grass plucked from a patch of Central Park, for reasons he eloquently explains in Objects.
The film turns from a thoughtful and entertaining meditation on the meaning of objects into a low-key suspense thriller when one of Liota’s subjects takes an interest in another and Rawlins’ egg comes into the temporary possession of Radiolab, which did a story about it in 2014. Radiolab is interested in the idea that the digitization of everything has sped the demise of hoarding physical objects: Who needs old records and books and press clippings when your phone can hold more than your apartment? Krulwich’s Radiolab co-creator and former co-host Jad Abumrad is among those skeptical of the notion that there’s magic imbued in old knick knacks. Radiolab sets out to render the sugar egg less special by technological means, and this is the point in the film when Krulwich makes the Einstein’s pencil analogy.
The film worked especially well in the context of a film festival in Indianapolis, a city that has taken care to preserve and revive its old structures instead of taking the increasingly popular (and shortsighted) approach of tearing them down and starting over. You can feel love and toil and wisdom in the bones of buildings. The festival takes place largely in the city’s Bottleworks Distict, a vibrant, buzzy neighborhood created from the remains of a Coca-Cola plant. Indianapolis is also the home city of Kurt Vonnegut, who perhaps more than any other author was enchanted by the idea of collapsing time. “Listen,” he wrote in his most popular book, Slaughterhouse Five. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” before laying out the story of man bouncing between now and then and forever.
Liota is a journalist and former senior producer of a PBS NOVA series called Nova scienceNOW. He notes that Objects is different from his previous works because it has less science. But it has more magic: Objects performs the remarkable trick of condensing decades of memories and meaning into just over an hour. We’re never allowed a spare moment to be less than charmed and captivated. Normally to do something like this you need scores of microchips — or better still, a sugar egg.
By Peter Wong on June 20, 2022
Vincent Liota’s warm and loving Closing Night Film “Objects” works the best kind of cinematic alchemy on the viewer’s mind. It entertainingly helps the viewer see the difference between mere acquisition and cherished personal touchstones. It fleshes out Marie Kondo’s famous “spark joy” catchphrase into something emotionally meaningful. Most importantly, it’s a film that can make the viewer care about the fate of a decades-old sugar half-egg.
That apparently worthless object is just one of three such valueless objects that provide the focus for Liota’s film. The others are a long browned handful of Central Park grass and a sweater once worn by a now forgotten minor French film actress.
Part of the fun of watching “Objects” is learning about the circumstances that made each of these objects special for their particular owner. In the case of graphic designer Rich Rawlins, something like the sugar half-egg provides a touchstone to a childhood of not being able to make long-term friends thanks to a father whose work took him (and his family) around the country. For NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich, that handful of grass was a memento of a wonderful moment from his teenage years. And writer Heidi Julavits connects her obsession with the actress’ clothing with a childhood which transformed the detritus left in the attic by the previous occupants of her house into a treasure trove of mystery.
Since the film’s three subjects all work in creative fields, it may seem that emotional connection between “worthless object” and object’s possessor might appear to be a rare occurrence. But a jaw dropping experiment by the Significant Objects Project involving 100 thrift store tchotchkes, customized fictional stories, and eBay shows otherwise. As revealed in Liota’s film, the created stories imbued the otherwise cheap objects with a value far greater than their actual monetary value.
Learning the stories behind the three objects cherished by the film’s main subjects is an exercise in delightful viewer tantalization. Instead of telling each story outright, it spins in other details first, such as a lost sweater or a New Year’s Eve party that sparked sadness. By the time the stories of an inconvenient moving day or an afternoon in front of Central Park’s Cleopatra’s Needle are told, the viewer can appreciate the personal importance of each “worthless” object to its owner.
Yet that outsider’s appreciation seems in the case of the grass and the sweater more of an intellectual reaction. Julavits’ efforts to get a sense of the life of Isabelle Corey, the actress who previously owned the sweater, never come close to capturing Corey’s offscreen persona. While Krulwich treats the clump of grass as an emotional touchstone, the specific details of the special moment symbolized by the dried plant matter remain a mystery. It’s only with Rawlins’ memento of a missed opportunity that the viewer makes an emotional connection. And that only happens when the viewer shares in the object’s story in a way that will not be spoiled here.
If Julavits’ story about her Corey obsession winds up having a low-key payoff, the author still manages to dominate the screen in her earlier appearances. Her attitudes towards objects can be summed up as “it might not spark joy in the moment, but it could conceivably do so at some point in the future.” Julavits’ assumption of the anti-Marie Kondo role is a joy to human pack rats everywhere.
(Objects” won a Special DocFest Jury Prize For Excellence In American Profiles.)
By Liz Whittemore November 14, 2021
Why do we sometimes save objects for years that seem precious to us, yet have no intrinsic value? For some, these mementos are the root of clutter and materialism, but for others, they are a treasured record of their lives. A way to hold on to time and life itself. A tangible nostalgia.
OBJECTS explores a very different kind of ‘collector.’ Through the lives of three unique individuals who have held onto a seemingly meaningless object – a fifty-year-old clump of grass, a sweater that once belonged to a French actress, and a forty-year-old sugar egg – the documentary explores how we find meaning. These objects are not things to be flaunted, rather they are items that profoundly touch their owners in ways that few others can understand.
Vincent Liota taps into our inherently sentimental human hearts. As someone who has a box of objects dating back to at least age 5, as someone who married a man with his own small chest of treasured things, and a mother that fills her home with memories (including a broken flamingo ornament that I would hide in the Christmas tree to avoid its demise), OBJECTS speaks directly to me.
While looking through the memories hidden inside his bookshelf, Robert Krulwich, former host of RadioLab and current NPR correspondent, says something that struck me, “That’s time travel.” Objects are stories. Objects are history. As for the doc, OBJECTS features items spanning from a clump of grass to a sugar egg. Hearing the meaning of these things directly from the people who keep them moves you. You are instantly invested in their safety and fascinated by their existence. The walkthroughs of spaces filled with memories create an emotional gravity that is undeniable. We all know the old saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” OBJECTS proves just that.
I adored the time focusing on the methods of Marie Kondo. Like everyone else, when her series hit Netflix, I started to rummage through my drawers, cabinets, and boxes of things. I pulled all my clothes out of the closet and threw them onto my bed to decide what sparked joy. It was much more difficult than I could have ever imagined. In the end, I think I tossed things based more on logic and not at all on sentimentality. When it comes to my children, well, that is another story. I have a box filled with their sweetest baby outfits.
OBJECTS captivates you with its ceaseless charm. Items that seem to have zero connection to the viewer go from innocuous to deeply meaningful. As we bounce from one unique narrative to the next, you cannot help but think about what is most important in your life. Perhaps it is not the object itself but the memory it evokes that we cherish so much. Regardless, OBJECTS reminds us that we are all connected, how a passing moment affects an entire lifetime. To quote Doctor Who, “We are all stories in the end, just make it a good one, eh?”