In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.
So many stories of the apocalypse involve massive shifts in social and personal behavior, survival tales of fantastical adaptation and colorful paradigm shifts in the face of world-ending adversity. What little life remains is overrun by zombies, body snatchers, infertility, apes, Skynet, or road warriors. So many of these still stand in for what’s left over after the bomb drops. Many other movies focus on the anxiety leading up to the pivotal point of no return, when the mutual assurances of destruction make good on their promises. But a rare and realistic question that few modern films ask is, “What happens when it all comes crashing down and you’re left standing, trying to carry on?” A made-for-TV movie so good that it escaped the confines of the small screen and earned its lead an Oscar nomination, Testament answers that question with harrowing elegance.
It’s a terrible truth, but the more cortisol is coursing through our geopolitics—the closer the clock gets to midnight, and it’s closer than ever—the more affecting this 1983 film becomes. By underplaying its nuclear aftermath, Testament struck a different chord than the massive small-screen sensation The Day After, which aired on ABC two weeks after Testament hit theaters. (Testament, which was originally made for American Playhouse, would air on PBS in 1984.) Both films tapped into a still-present fear, exacerbated by the gungho political leadership of the time, but it’s Testament‘s intimate study of a suburban California family eroding away on the edge of the blast zone that remains most emotionally jarring.
The contained perspective pursued by Oscar-winning filmmaker Lynne Littman and the steely dignity of Carol Wetherly, played by Jane Alexander (who recently turned up in the second season of Severance), make it impossible to boil the creeping threat of fallout down to anything as cute as a “duck and cover” slogan or as singular as a mushroom cloud. It kills slowly but surely, conveyed through clumps of hair and dirty water and bloody towels. Across the film’s ellipses, mostly contained to the Wetherly home, the world and its people deteriorate. From scene to scene, bodies fall apart or fail entirely, without explicit mention. There’s just a space where a child or a neighbor or a father used to be. It’s a domestic Chernobyl, haunting and thoroughly grounded in Jane’s world.
Fittingly based on a Ms. magazine short story by Carol Amen, Testament‘s perspective is squarely that of a stay-at-home mom. This is no macho fantasy about bootstrapping survival and personal ability, but a piece about compassion and care in the face of inevitable death. It’s as much about remembering as it is about persevering. It’s a devastating story, but one that balances its horrors and tragedies with a respect for life, dissociated from anything as crass as the dog-eat-dog mindset of most post-apocalypse films. In fact, Testament begins with the voice of Jane Fonda, icon of the decade’s workouts, juxtaposed with the tolling tones of composer James Horner—the sounds of life and death, fluttering together in the breeze like Carol’s curtains.
The collision of these massive themes and Carol’s quotidian household labor (cleaning spills, dressing the kids, planning birthdays) means that the unfamiliar mode of death keeps finding purchase in the utterly familiar details of life. Aside from a screen-blinding flash of light—which interrupts an emergency news broadcast, itself interrupting an episode of Sesame Street—Testament offers no genre effects. There is no boom, no drone shot of debris, no cutaway to the news showing how little of the coasts remain in order to hammer home that Carol’s husband (William Devane) will never return from work. Instead, the film watches the increasingly abnormal duties undertaken by Carol, her children (the youngest played by Lukas Haas in his first role), and the strays and stragglers she takes in over time.
Chores like washing clothes and preparing food, over the months, are overtaken by securing size-small burial shrouds and contemplating suicide. The slow encroachment of radiation sickness and organ failure also portends an encroaching brain drain; Carol’s oldest son tries to learn ham radio from an older hobbyist while her daughter asks her mother about sex, knowing in the back of her mind that she’ll never grow up to experience it. These are dark final days, with plenty of dead children—and, alongside a minor appearance by pre-fame Rebecca De Mornay and Kevin Costner, a dead infant—but Alexander’s sensitive strength persists alongside Littman’s visual eulogies. Gracefully blending obituary and memory using home movies and answering machine messages, Testament watches a family say goodbye over and over again, standing in for a world which must learn to grieve without giving up.
Alexander said that before she was cast in Testament, she’d had a decade-long recurring nightmare about camping with her children on the day that the bombs fell on New York. “There are thousands of people walking out of New York City, and flyers coming down saying, ‘400-mile-long cloud of radiation blankets the Northeast. Do not eat shellfish. Do not eat grasses or anything growing.’ We tried to get back home. We stop. We lay down under a tree because it’s a hot summer day. The boys go into a pond and start eating shellfish.” Like in Alexander’s stress dream, Testament appreciates what it has even when all is lost. When Carol’s surviving children blow out their birthday candles—yes, celebrating birthdays up until the end—she tells them to wish, “That we remember it all. The good and the awful. The way we finally lived. That we never gave up.” The nobility here, in this particular story of disaster, is that “never giving up” doesn’t mean struggling to survive until the bitter end—it means intentionally maintaining one’s humanity, rather than freely giving it away.
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