There's a moment early on in Linda Brown's fascinating film, YOU SEE ME, of old footage being shown of her and her sister dressed up as husband and wife when they were kids. The two of them are performing for the camera, ultimately portraying their parents hug, dance, kiss, and fight. It's an incredibly engaging and deep moment because Brown has provided us the ability to look closer. On the surface, we see two siblings playing House. On another level, they may be expressing an emotional disconnect they've witnessed in their parents. How often do we hide emotions? Can we find the moments in our lives where we most represent ourselves? Is it more beneficial to ignore the times when you're least yourself, or more harmful?
Stanley Brown, Linda's father has had a stroke. It's left him with walking and talking as the challenge. Reminiscing through footage, Linda seeks to answer who her father really was, and what challenges he faced before the stroke. But as the film travels through more and more footage and photos of her parents' era, the mystery continues to grow farther from any catharsis. His entire speech to his friends and family during his 50th wedding anniversary is "I've worked hard all my life for one thing, for a higher education for my children. I didn't have it. That's about it."
The ongoing theme of Stanley is he shows as little emotion as needed. Yet he strikes you as someone you could easily talk to. Linda even expresses how she was more drawn to him growing up than her mother. It makes sense. He's lively and energetic, as long as the conversation didn't involve him. So what would it take to get a man like Stanley to say the words, "I love you"?
Natalie, Linda's mother, hints at her shy personality not necessarily helping her understand who her husband was underneath. Perhaps because of his upbringing he doesn't see a need for it. His mother had to raise him on her own, and it wasn't until he was sixteen he was told his real last name. You get the feeling that the heart-to-heart types of conversations, ones that came to a mutual understanding of love or fear, as needed as they are for someone like Stanley and everyone around him, were avoided, few, and far between. This film is on a hunt for what to make of those few moments.
Linda reminisces with her three siblings of times when their father would get physical with them and their mother. She even describes to her sister the heartbreaking memory of having to stand between her parents, to take the hit for her mother. "That's our role," is what they agreed upon that day, though simultaneously the Browns have no reason to think of Stanley as a cruel man.
It's clear Stanley's life and behavior have always peaked his family's interest. Linda shows footage of a previous documentary about her father, YOUR FAVORITE from 1984, in which she interviews Stanley directly, discussing how he was known to not show much affection for his children. The footage shows an uncomfortable closeup of a man so distant and so inaccessible he rarely looks up from the floor. The answer to his daughter's questions primarily is "I don't know." If YOUR FAVORITE was Linda's attempt to understanding her father, even just a little, YOU SEE ME shows just how tall and wide he's built a wall around himself, and that Linda must dig deeper than interviewing him to get in.
There's an uncanny similarity between Stanley Brown and my own grandfather. He didn't have strong parental figures, nor did he treat his four children with much affection, and he couldn't utter the words, "I love you," to his wife until his first child was ten years of age. Though, similar to Stanley, nothing in his world came close to his devotion for them. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to have a particular conversation. Affection in itself can be an entirely different language. And what seems like the final piece of an unsolved puzzle, YOU SEE ME's powerful bittersweet ending proves Stanley was never unwilling or incapable of affection. It's that he has to speak an unknown language over a wall to do so.