51 Birch Street - Plot

Plot

51 Birch Street is the first-person account of a family's unpredictable journey through dramatic life-changing events. Having observed most of his parents' 54-year marriage, Doug Block believed it to be quite a good one. A few months after his mother's sudden death from pneumonia, Doug Block's 83-year old father, Mike, calls him to announce that he’s moving to Florida to live with "Kitty", his secretary from 40 years before. Always close to his mother and equally distant from his father, Doug and his two older sisters were shocked and suspicious. How long had Kitty been an intimate part of their father’s life, they wondered.

When Mike and Kitty marry and sell the longtime family home, Doug returns to suburban Long Island with camera in hand for one last visit. Among the lifetime of memories being packed away forever, Doug discovers three large boxes filled with his mother's daily diaries going back 35 years, in which she recorded her unhappiness, her rage against her husband, her sexual fantasies about her therapist, a brief affair with an unnamed friend of her husband — and her suspicions about Kitty. The marriage, Mike told Doug on film, "was not loving, it was a functioning association". Realizing he has only a few short weeks before the movers come and his father will be gone for good, Doug is determined to explore the mystery of his parents' marriage.

Through conversations with family members and friends, and surprising diary revelations, Doug finally comes to peace with his parents who are more complex and troubled than he ever imagined. However, unlike other notable documentaries on family from the years around 2000, such as Capturing the Friedmans and Tarnation, 51 Birch Street doesn't reveal terrible secrets or extreme dysfunction of an ordinary family. Instead, the documentary explores more subtle forms of repression, secrecy and denial within a family, and confirms the complexity of marriage.