“THE WOODMANS” My rating: B (Opening June 17 at the Screenland Crossroads)
84 minutes | No MPAA rating
How do you compete with a ghost?
That’s the conundrum facing a family of artists in the wake of the suicide of their hugely talented and deeply disturbed daughter.
George and Betty Woodman struggled much of their lives to make it as artists. He was an abstract expressionist painter. She was a ceramicist whose credo was to make useful objects.
But they were easily eclipsed by their daughter Francesca, who picked up a camera in high school and by the time she was enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design was already on the way to being one of the 20th century’s great photographers.
Her classmates recall a girl who didn’t come to learn so much as to refine her already established style. Francesca specialized in self-portraits, often nudes, taken in aging rooms with peeling wallpaper and worn floors.
Butler's Cinema Scene 