Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

Much of the acting is similarly empty. Stark doesn’t appear to understand the emotional thrust of Ana Valdivia’s script, or maybe she just doesn’t care. Whatever the case, the actors seem to have received almost no guidance and are acting in about eight different movies. Gabriel Zielinski plays Isabella’s greedy half brother, Henry, as a mustache-twirling Disney villain; Sergei Gavrikov’s Ferdinand is like a feckless lad in his first year at Cambridge. The only exception, somewhat oddly, is Allison Mieskowski, who overcomes Stark’s lack of directorial vision to give us an Isabella who is regal, cruel, loving, and riveting. She singlehandedly saves her love scene with Ferdinand, tearing into him like a lioness (or, with her corona of red-gold hair, maybe a lion).

As for Stark, Isabella may be evidence of a fundamental flaw. Her films to date have been stories of strange and lonely people trying to carve out lives for themselves, and only for themselves. But Isabella has to triangulate between her lover, her brother, and the country she will one day rule — it’s a film of relationships, and Stark has never been good at relationships.

Stark is famously private, at times verging on the reclusive. In interviews she is not so much evasive as simply absent, as though the human interaction of answering questions is uninteresting to her. But true loners don’t make the best directors. Isabella reveals a basic inability to communicate with actors (and possibly with crew — who thought it was a good idea to light Ferdinand and Isabella’s wedding like a middle school dance?). It also reveals a misunderstanding — or, worse, a disregard — for what an audience might think and feel. Stark’s brain must be a fascinating place, but she seems incapable of seeing outside it.

WHEN JACOB MARRIED MY SISTER, I WAS SORRY FOR HIM. NOT at first, not when they met me at the airport and I saw how carefully she listened to him talk, how interested she was in him. Not at the altar, where she wore high-heeled shoes and looked beautiful and serious and said “I do” like she meant it. I felt sorry for him later, when the party had gone on well into the night, his friends laughing and playing music on the little spit of beach next to the house and quietly, without telling anyone, Sophie had slipped out of her dress and stepped into the lake. I didn’t see her go in. I turned with my glass of wedding wine and saw the dress lying on the dock and, far away, her bony shoulders in the lake, and when I turned back to the party, I saw that Jacob was watching, too.

“When did she learn to swim?” I asked him.

It made me sad that I had to ask, but long ago I’d had to accept that I would see and know Sophie on her terms and not mine. When she called to tell me she was getting married, I hadn’t talked to her in a year.

“I taught her,” he said.

He sounded proud, but then we both watched her swim out into the middle of the lake, putting her own wedding farther and farther behind her.

“She’s a quick study,” he said, and I wanted to tell him then to get used to it, that all my strongest memories of Sophie were of her leaving.

So when she said she wanted to stay with me for a while, I kept my expectations low. A weekend, maybe a week, and then she’d fly back to New York one day while I was teaching and, if I was lucky, leave a note. My wife, Reese, was worried.

“She always makes you feel bad,” she said.

It was true and it wasn’t. Our mom was dead, and I was the only family Sophie had, and I was pretty sure I understood her better than anybody else. Sometimes that felt good, like when she was giving an interview and she talked about The Tick or Batman: The Animated Series and I felt like she was winking at me. And sometimes it made me angry, because she didn’t let me help her. I knew she never should’ve gotten back together with Allison, for instance, but she wouldn’t listen to me. In fact, I thought she should never have gone to New York in the first place. She should’ve stayed in Iowa and built her career more slowly, and I could’ve helped her, and she wouldn’t have made so many crazy decisions or had so much pain in her life. I’d learned my lesson with CeCe; I was ready to protect her. But every time I told her to come home and figure things out from here, she said no. And now she was coming without my asking. I was glad, but I felt a little robbed too, like she always had to make things her idea.

On a rainy Wednesday she showed up at our door. It was always easy to forget how small my sister was, because she was square-shouldered (all the way up through high school my shirts fit her snugly) and stood so straight and had those big serious eyes. But that day on my doorstep she looked tiny, her shoulders all hunched in. Her hair was greasy and her face had aged since I’d seen her last — she had lines on her forehead, dark stains under her eyes. She was thirty-four.

“Do you have any oatmeal?” she asked me.

For the first couple of days she barely talked. I tried to ask her about her next projects and give her what I thought was good advice, but she just answered me in monosyllables or not at all. She ate tiny amounts of oatmeal and canned fruit cocktail; she lay on the couch, wrapped in a blanket in the sticky heat of the Iowa summer, while Reese went to her office and I went to teach film theory to a bunch of twenty-year-olds. I was in the third year of my Ph.D., and my house was full of movies — movies we’d loved as teenagers ( Alien, The Silence of the Lambs ), movies Sophie had taught me to love in college ( Rebecca, Paranormal Activity ), movies I’d gotten into since then and wanted to show her ( Inside, Sunshine, Rampo Noir ). But all she wanted to watch, over and over, were the animated Lord of the Rings videos we’d watched as kids. She was especially obsessed with The Return of the King . One sweaty afternoon I caught her at the end of it; she looped right back to the beginning without even getting up to go to the bathroom.

“What is it with this movie?” I asked her. It wasn’t even our favorite from growing up — if she wanted to be nostalgic, she could’ve watched E.T .

“I like the elves leaving Middle-earth,” she said.

“Why?” I asked her. I didn’t like how her voice had been since she’d arrived, even flatter than usual, like she was reading aloud from a technical manual.

“I like how when they didn’t belong in the world anymore, they could leave and go somewhere safe.”

On screen, the elves were sailing their white ships into gray mist, disappearing.

Reese was the one who said we should take her to the doctor. Reese was loose-limbed and easygoing; she loved silly jokes and cheap beer and dancing. But she was also a tax accountant, and she had a wide seam of practicality running through her, and the older I got, the more grateful I was for it.

“She’s batshit,” Reese said calmly. “She needs help.”

I didn’t like the idea of taking Sophie to a stranger, but I thought maybe a doctor could get her to open up a little bit, and then she and I could go from there. I didn’t know much about therapists, and Sophie didn’t have insurance, so the first shrink I took her to was a weird old Freudian who only wanted to talk about Sophie’s dreams.

“I never remember my dreams,” she said in the car afterward. “Why didn’t he believe me?”

I knew it was true. As a kid I’d been jealous of how quickly she could fall asleep, while I lay awake terrified of the red-toothed old woman who crawled out from under my bed as soon as I shut my eyes.

“We’ll find you another one,” I said.

The second shrink was a sweet lady whose waiting room smelled like incense and who told Sophie the solution to her problems was to cut out gluten and get a Reiki massage.