Full Frame Review: Forgetting Dad

Note: Forgetting Dad screened at the 2009 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, making its North American premiere. Details of its release are unknown at this point.

Richard Minnich was rear-ended in the early 1990s, resulting in a life- and family-altering case of amnesia. Minnich, at the time, was living with his second family in Davis, Calif. but ultimately left them and, years later, ended up with a new wife in a remote corner of Oregon. Almost 20 years after his father's amnesia, son (from the first marriage) Rick Minnich set out to capture his father's story.

Rick Minnich, and many of his family members, were left in the dust with their patriarch's amnesia. His medical remained hidden and their father a distant figure. But there was some evidence suggesting Richard Minnich was faking his amnesia.

Forgetting Dad thrives on its narrative. Rick Minnich's film is almost a documentary noir, his father and, in some ways, himself the anti-hero and the wives femme fatales. Rick Minnich provides the standard voiceover of the hardboiled detective, and the narrative is an engaging and constantly surprising story of a tortured-sympathetic-twisted man who has spent decades troubling his families. It's a documentary rooted in the grand tradition of film noir, connecting classic film of the 1950s to one man's modern family.

But some editing aspects of the film are troublesome. Rick Minnich's involvement in the film--as director and researcher--falls to the ills of documentarians deeply connected to his work. His voiceover seems heavy-handed at times, not to mention the overuse of sustained, heavily symbolic nature shots that become cumbersome and just plain obnoxious. These faults don't distract from the narrative, but they are a disappointing aspect of what is an interesting tale of a troubled father and his more troubled family.