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Documentary filmmaker Doug Block had every reason to believe his parents' 54-year marriage was a good one. But when his mother dies unexpectedly and his father swiftly marries his former secretary, he...( read more  read more... ) discovers two parents who are far more complex and troubled than he ever imagined.

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97% liked it

36 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 30 min.

Directed by: Doug Block

Release Date: October 18, 2006

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DVD Release Date: August 14, 2007

Stats: 77 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (77)

  • organgrinder136
    August 15, 2007
    organgrinder136
    insightful docu into the lives of one family. keeps you entertained throughout. i have to admit i fell asleep for ten minutes but that was only down to being totally knackered. pissed off i missed those 10. really makes you think about your own family and what secrets the other m...( read more)embers could hide. it shows you how you sometimes spend your life with someone and still never really know them. like the filmer in the flick i agree and think with parents ignorance is bliss and it's better to not know as children if there has been a shady past, but is that being apathetic?
  • Fragglefreak
    April 4, 2009
    Fragglefreak
    Interesting because it's so personal. The director obviously wanted to make a documentary about his family but found out more than he was ready for.
  • SansSouciBlogs1
    October 25, 2009
    SansSouciBlogs1
    I pulled a DVD off the shelf and sat down to a documentary that moved me emotionally, to such a point that I am haunted by it.

    51 Birch Street came out in 2005. It is a film by Doug Block whose intent was to document his family's life and in doing so unearthed his parent's deepe...( read more)st secrets. Our question to ourselves is: how much is too much information?

    51 Birch Street rubs our noses into our own lives by giving us a family to observe and identify with. We all can.

    Doug does documentaries and does them well. He also photographs weddings and knows which ones will last and which ones will dissolve within the year.

    The movie begins with his parents Mike and Mina in the back yard celebration of their 50th anniversary. At that moment they make marriage look so easy, so "the way it should be."

    In interviews, Mina is usually the outspoken one, and Mike sits by passively, but appears to agree with all Mina offers. She loves him. She says so. In her own way.

    They married in the early 1950's and lived on Long Island, New York in the town of Port Washington, a town I know well. It was a typical 3-kid-house-suburban life. Mother home. Dad works. The post war American dream.

    Mike Block is described by one of the daughters as a typical 1950s father who never shared his feelings. None of the children feels close to him or remembers having any together-time with him.

    Mina is the center of the universe, and when she becomes ill suddenly and dies the universe implodes, then explodes, when her volumes of journals are found. Her friend becomes an integral key to information and speaks for Mina, who has left cartons of loose leafs, thousands of handwritten pages, boxes of typewritten elucidations of her life. Was this a legacy or a curse? Mina's friend feels Mina would have wanted her children to read the journals.

    The children decide that they have an obligation to read her diaries and learn that their mother was in pain for many years. References to entries are made visible to the viewer by highlighting varies typed words, as if in a cryptic puzzle or "search-a word."
    "Extramarital." "Outside the marriage." "I am begging for your love."

    She was in love with her therapist "Ben," and wanted to have an affair with him. He wouldn't; she had one with someone else. She was a lonely dissatisfied woman. She was an adventurous, passionate, open-minded (pass the joint, kids) woman. But the kids don't remember feeling particularly attached to her; she was distant. She was disconnected. She was miserable.

    The universal reaction is, how much do I want or need to know?

    Viewing a family in its vulnerable state is like watching a car accident.
    We are shocked but can't turn away. We are glad it didn't happen to us.
    But unlike a car accident, we can't just drive off. We all know this vulnerability in our deepest place. We've been there in some way either through our family or our own marriage or relationships.

    A mere three months after Mina's death, Mike, age 83, marries his former secretary. The children are shocked, and new questions arise that pop out of Mina's journals. Was Mike having an affair with Carol years ago? Their first kiss at the wedding was about "12 seconds long."

    So the mystery unravels as Doug's camera rolls. What I also found to be interesting was Doug and his wife's view of their own marriage and connect with the universal premise: that no union is ever perfect.
    Happiness is on a day-by day basis. I was intrigued also as Doug and his wife live where I grew up in a housing development on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Stuyvesant Town, that pulled me in emotionally even more.

    The use of a movie camera helped Doug to connect with his father, who opens up and is confronted by questions. No, he never cheated and yes, he was very unhappy for many years. When Doug asks his father after his mother's passing, "do you miss her?" and his father says he didn't, my heart broke for all of them.

    But in the end, it is Mike who is the one who opens up like a character in a novel. We see real growth; the camera has enabled him to communicate. He reconnects with a woman with whom he has a basic warmth, a genuine bond. He can now smile and have a life.

    The camera is a hero.

    And so is the ability to communicate.

    5i Birch Street has been acclaimed from here to Toronto. No one in the family expected this. The daughters were uneasy about the revelations and how their lives were an open book for the world to read. But where ever there was an opening there was applause. This seemingly simple documentary had connected us all with the thread of the human condition.

    You can view the trailer here.
    http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi900989209/
  • svmainus
    November 10, 2008
    svmainus
    Filmmaker Doug Block takes footage from his own family and forms a documentary about his parents after the unexpected death of his mother. Very close and insightful (and often uncomfortable) look at his parents, their relationship, how that wore on their children; as well as som...( read more)e revealing though sad information on his mother that was found in her many hundreds of journals she kept over the years. There was some discussion even in the documentary if she would have wanted that to come out; but if you write journals and hang onto them for decades knowing full well if you do that someone is going to find them someday? You want them found. I would suggest watching "Who Knew?" which is a short on the special features of the same disc after viewing the documentary to see the reactions of the various family members once the movie premiered. That is the icing on the cake. Enjoy.
  • jfvirey
    September 24, 2008
    jfvirey
    A producer and director of documentary films, Doug Block turns his camera on his own parents, Mike and Mina. The latter is warm and talkative, the former benevolent but rather withdrawn, secretive and difficult to relate to. It is obvious who Block feels closer to.

    But then tr...( read more)agedy strikes. Mina catches pneumonia and dies within a fortnight. And no more than four months later, Mike has reconnected with a secretary he knew decades earlier, has married her, and is selling the family house on 51 Birch Street to move to Florida and live with his new wife.

    The film documents Block's gradual discovery of his parents' marital secrets through his interviews with his father, siblings and family friends, and, more
    importantly, the reading of three full boxes of his mother's obsessively self-absorbed diaries.

    "51 Birch Street" is an interesting story of the marital problems of two atheistic Jews (Mike declares himself "within the Humanistic tradition", and Mina was the sexually emancipated, pot-smoking peace
    activist), who happened to get married in 1947, right as Kinsey was engineering the sexual revolution in America (his name is not mentioned in the film, but the man must have been behind Mina's reoccupation with "orgasm" and "fellatio", two words highlighted by her son in her diary), and who fell prey to the influence
    of the personal Saviour and Redeemer of the modern atheistic Jew: the psychoanalyst ("Everybody falls in
    love with their therapist", a lady friend comments at one point.)

    As a family mystery, the film is worth watching, just like an episode of the British genealogy series "Who Do You Think You Are?", but I wish Block had tried to delve into the broader socio-cultural currents that impacted on his parents' marriage. Being himself a modern atheistic Jew who shares his parents' basic outlook (he describes himself as "not that religious" and turns to a psychoanalyst for answers), he is only critical of the traditional gender roles and expectations of the 40's and 50's, which bear the blame for whatever may have gone wrong in his parents' marriage, and is very casual about the pathologies of our era - such as drugs, divorce and adultery.
  • SadisticMinister
    May 1, 2008
    SadisticMinister
    When Doug Block's mother suddenly dies, his father quickly marries his former secretary.
    Is the father a heartless schmuck or is he just a poor man who's been caged in a loveless marriage for to long?
  • thrusz
    October 25, 2007
    thrusz
    Man, I really hate falling behind on movie reviews. I actually feel pretty bad right now because I have to be at work in an hour and I know I don't have the time to review all these movies the way they should be reviewed, but here it goes.

    I remember seeing the trailer for th...( read more)is movie Honestly, it really intrigued me. My father died when I was twelve and part of me has always been slightly concerned about tarnishing that perfect image of my father in my head. I somewhat assumed that Block had the same feelings. In a way, he did and he didn't. I can't blame the movie for not being my life. That's obviously impossible, but Block led a wonderful life a long time adult relationship with his mother. (Not like that, skeez!) So when his mother died, he investigated and discovered that his mother was a real woman with real issues. However, this concept comes and goes throughout the documentary.

    Here's my thought process. The beginning of the film discusses how close Block is with his mother and how distant he is with his father. Somehow, these feelings are morphed and ignored and it is later revealed that no one was close to mother and that dad is a really relatible guy. But really, these are just statements that are made by both Doug Block and the rest of the family. It seems simply like a moody piece and that emotions are dictated by the moods the individuals are in.

    Yes, it's interesting to read that that people put on two faces, but the people documented are already very honest with the camera. There is very little prying going on and no one really walks on broken glass. Perhaps we can thank Block for choosing the most honest aspects of his footage, but there really was no need for research because everyone is always saying how they really feel outright.
  • 404NotFound
    August 21, 2007
    404NotFound
    Boring poster, but the plot intrigues me.

View All 51 Birch Street Reviews

Critic Reviews

November 24, 2006
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

The film grows in power as it goes, finding ever more universal levels of feeling. full review

November 13, 2006
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Through haunting home movies, Mina's diaries and interviews with Mike, a raw, riveting portrait emerges of what a child sees in his parents' relationship and what lies beneath. full review

November 4, 2006
Colin Covert, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

Since the trend of documentary films as a vehicle for the camera operator's family therapy seems firmly established, we can only hope it produces more stories of this caliber. full review

October 18, 2006
A.O. Scott, The New York Times

In 51 Birch Street, a moving and fascinating documentary, Doug Block investigates the lingering, buried frustration in his parents otherwise ordinary lives.

View more 51 Birch Street reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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