FOR NICK, FROM DAD
(Nick Damore, 2023, USA, 42 minutes)
Nick Damore's first-person documentary takes on a lot in 42 minutes, but not more than it can bear.
In his directorial debut, Nick recounts a childhood spent with the father he never really knew, investigative journalist and longtime Cape Cod resident Leo J. Damore (Senatorial Privilege). Leo, 66 at the time, took his life when Nick was 10 years old.
The film begins with audio from a cassette recording in which Leo explains how much Nick means to him, so the love wasn't in doubt, except his father was obsessed with writing. Beyond the books of fiction and non-fiction, he was a compulsive diarist who left scores of journals behind.
Plenty of writers take an obsessive approach to their craft, but Leo did so at the expense of his second family--and possibly his first (Nick has a stepbrother and sister). He was also looking into to the kinds of cover-ups, like Chappaquiddick, that unsettle powerful people and organizations, like the Kennedy clan and the CIA, so some associates suspect foul play in the way he went off the deep end toward the end of life. He was also keeping a major secret that Nick didn't discover until well after Leo's death.
Nick is now working on a book about his father. The director attended the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the creative non-fiction professor who sent him down this path--possibly Clyde Edgerton, but I'm not 100% certain--was at the screening. I spoke to both, briefly, afterward. It's so great to see professor-student relationships lead to such substantial and presumably cathartic work in the years after college. I can only imagine how much a creative kid, who lost his father at such an early age, could have really used a mentor to help him channel his frustration in a focused manner.
When Nick was younger, he really didn't want to deal with his father's suicide or the unfortunate events that led up to it, but as he told People magazine in 2022, "When someone takes their life, they may think they are releasing their family from a burden but they fail to see they are also shackling them. It leaves things so unresolved that it leaves a chasm. So these projects are my attempt at feeling whole and hoping to understand things better. It's when we don't address what happened that it lingers."
I know what he means. I never experienced the suicide of a parent, but my mom did. Though she was an adult when it happened, her father's disappearance after her parents' divorce, combined with his self-inflicted death in the 1970s, left her family with a mystery that will never be solved; unlike Leo Damore, my grandfather, who also started a second family, didn't leave any clues, like journals or research materials.
Since the elder Damore's passing in 1995, his best known book, 1989 bestseller Senatorial Privilege, has been re-titled Chappaquiddick Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-Up. Nick claims that John Curran's 2017 docudrama Chappaquiddick, in which Jason Clarke plays Ted Kennedy and Kate Mara plays Mary Jo Kopechne, was inspired by Leo's book--and the cover copy backs him up--but he received no mention in the credits. Considering that it's the definitive statement on the subject, that does seem unfortunate.
Due to the unusual length of For Nick, I'm not sure where it will turn up next--possibly PBS or The Criterion Channel--but it screened with a short, Thomas Corriveau's painterly Marie. Eduardo. Sophie., and followed a performance by Portland-by-way-of-Wilmington musician and filmmaker Leigh Jones, aka Eugenia Riot, who sang John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy" that brought a tear to my eye. She said that Cucalorus founder Dan Brawley had told her to sing whatever she wanted; considering Lennon's lyrics about the future he envisioned for his son, Sean--but never got to experience--she couldn't have chosen a more touchingly apt song.
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