CIFF REVIEW: Helen and the Bear [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 81 minutes
Director(s): Alix Blair
Writer(s): Alix Blair & Katrina Taylor

The paths not taken since I entered into marriage are beckoning again.

The obvious entry point into the lives of her aunt and uncle was always going to be through him. Pete McCloskey was a revered congressman from San Mateo County, California whose experiences as a Marine during the Korean War led him onto an anti-war path despite representing the Republican party. He was a renegade and activist who would eventually switch party affiliation later in life to work alongside his wife Helen helping to register minority voters towards the goal of saving democracy from the collapse we’re ultimately witnessing today.

That was Alix Blair’s original intent when starting the project upon moving to California and getting to know the couple better after having only seen them half a day each year as a child. Once she began digging deeper into his career arc and their relationship, however, she realized her aunt was the more interesting subject. Twenty-six years younger than Pete, she was everything his first wife (with whom he had four children) wasn’t. Helen worked as his aide. She understood the politics and the job. She knew the importance of his work and was willing to stand by his side in its pursuit because she also craved the independence his absence would afford.

This fact is key to Helen and the Bear because their love isn’t conventional. Not in the sense of romance or the drama that results. Helen wasn’t a homewrecker as one might presume from a superficial reading of their coupling. Pete’s career is what ended his marriage. And their longevity despite the age gap and living on a farm isn’t the product of perfection as many would like to assume happily-ever-afters are built upon. No, they’ve endured an open relationship of sorts. They’ve leaned on friendship, mutual respect, and a nontraditional sense of loyalty uninterested in monogamy. They weathered the storm of personal tumult and public decorum to come out stronger than ever before.

What I found captivating is the luck involved to get there. Not on behalf of who Helen and Pete are/were, but that they met when they did. Because the more you hear about her adolescence self-identifying as a boy yet not feeling as though she was gay and his early career as a Republican, the two would surely have despised each other had their meeting occurred today. She would have had a better understanding of being non-binary and/or bisexual. His being a member of the Republican party would have demanded a rejection of what she stood for. So, meeting in the seventies was fate. Pete’s party hadn’t yet fallen so far into fearmongering that he wasn’t allowed the nuance to evolve and she was still mired in notion that the private life she craved must remain separate from the public life his career demanded.

As such, we see how her sexuality might have changed his politics (if the horrors of war weren’t going to be able to do so on their own). We learn about the reality that marriage as an institution mustn’t strictly adhere to patriarchal gender norms to survive. That there needs to be a balance and compromise between who you are together and who you are alone—and how one shouldn’t be sacrificed for the other. Helen could accept his devotion to the job and extramarital affairs because that space allowed her to focus on her own form of both. And his love for her despite those things proved to him what love was—something his own children couldn’t (his daughter admits that they respected the heck out of what he stood for, but knew they’d always be a footnote in his life).

Their bond only grew as a result, reaching this inevitable moment where her sixties meant he wasn’t long for this world. Rather than let that reality change who they are, though, it merely reinforces who they’ve always been. They still do the work signing up voters. They still get high on mushrooms together and travel in their RV with their dogs. Yes, Helen thinks about what life without him will afford her on the independence scale, but that doesn’t negate the feelings of loneliness she knows will arrive once he’s gone. Because no matter what they did on their own during their marriage, they still had each other to lean on and come home to. Their love was strong enough to endure the other stuff. That other stuff was never strong enough to replace their love.

You must admire the candidness that comes from these types of documentaries due to a family member holding the camera. Blair’s relationship to her subjects affords access, but it’s her curiosity to truly understand them that delivers what we need to invest in learning about them too. The ever-present crosscuts between identical moments captured in the past via home movie and Blair’s footage in the present-day say everything about how important and consistent Helen and Pete are to each other. And the use of her diaries to serve as captions and context for new revelations and admissions adds to their shared humanity on-screen. The film exposes a truth about America through the truth of two people who shouldn’t work under our current tribalistic and fractured political psyche. It proves the labels and fear being weaponized to keep us apart are just a smokescreen manufactured by hate and greed.