Socks on Fire
**Seen at the 2021 Atlanta Film Festival.
Bo McGuire’s Nanny didn’t like to air her dirty laundry in public; he’s fine setting it ablaze with a flamethrower.
“Socks on Fire” is a thoughtful, lyrical and entertaining documentary from a grandson to his grandmother, but it’s also about a family that doesn’t exist anymore because of the actions of one of its own. McGuire uses home video footage, re-enactments and present-day interviews to show the life he remembered growing up, and life as it currently exists for his family, while exploring how it went from one state of being to another. McGuire shows up onscreen not just as an interviewer of his family, but almost as a spectral presence helping to guide us through the past, or even showing empathy to the people in that past, like the angels in Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire.” This isn’t a solemn meditation on life and death, however; it’s about one man putting someone who meant so much to him on blast, hoping they might, one day, see the error of their ways. Few interventions have been so inspiring and enjoyable to watch.
We are introduced to all the major players in McGuire’s family early on- his Nanny (as his grandmother was called) had four children; two boys and two girls. The oldest is Bo’s mother, the youngest is John (separated by 16 years), with another boy and a girl in between. The other key sibling in the film is Sharon. Bo is the oldest of Nanny’s grandchildren. Home video footage shows a loving family dynamic that means so much to Bo still, but his narration sometimes points to things that will become crucial to this family’s breaking point, or at least, Sharon’s. Hearing Bo talk about his family is profound, a reminder that often, even if it goes sideways later, some of our fondest memories are built growing up in the best of familial circumstances. The significant drama between the family will play out after Nanny dies; she didn’t have a written will, and while she told Bo’s mother that she was in charge of everything, that leaves an opening for Sharon to undercut her mother’s hopes. You see, John was living at the house with his mother, but while most of the family wanted to make sure John still had a place to live, Sharon was perfectly content for him to be homeless. Why? That’s a case of good ol’ fashioned homophobia, because John is gay, and has been a drag queen in Alabama. The legal struggle that follows, however, is less the center of the movie, but how things might have gotten this way between two people who were formative for Bo realizing who he was as a gay man- that’s the richer story, anyway.
This is the second documentary I’ve seen in a week for my Atlanta Film Festival coverage to rely heavily on re-enactments to tell their story; the other one is “A Fire Within,” and it’s approach is much different than McGuire’s here. What distinguishes both films is how they use these re-enactments of the past to capture the painful emotions the storytellers are feeling remembering what those moments mean to their lives. There are three timeframes that McGuire takes us back to with his- Sharon’s teenage years, when she first meets her future husband (Sonny), and runs away from home (Sharon is played in these by Odessa Young from last year’s “Shirley,” by the way); Bo’s childhood, especially in his heading into the forest behind his Nanny’s home; and the present with Sharon. Sharon does not actually appear in the film except for archival footage, where she appears to be a wonderful woman, filled with life and love. Contrast that to the Sharon which McGuire presents in his present day re-enactments; played by Chuck Duck, she is a camp version of a homophobic, paranoid woman, especially as she calls into a local hotline for people wanting to buy or sell stuff. There’s alternately a level of humor and heartbreak to these scenes which McGuire captures, and that’s crucial to understanding his approach throughout the film when it comes to Sharon- he’s not here to make her out to be more of a villain than she’s already done herself; the Sharon now feels disconnected from the one McGuire grew up looking up to, and this is his way of dealing with that cognitive dissonance.
In the end, “Socks on Fire” is a love letter to family. The family we have, the family we’ve lost, and the memories we have to remember them by. Sometimes, we have to deliver some hard truths to our family, which is what he’s doing with Sharon here. When we have moments that we know our family will never be quite the same again, we mourn the loss of something that was so profound to us by looking at the past, and holding on to it tight. For Bo McGuire, he’s shared the family he has left, and those memories, with us. I couldn’t be more grateful to him for doing so.
