“Boston filmmaker Tom Curran’s documentary exploration of his emotionally complex upbringing is also deeply personal, resonant and brave.…Ultimately, the picture painted in this ample 56-minute arc is of a flawed man, deeply loved and ultimately forgiven, whose untimely departure left a lot of baggage – though maybe no more than if he’d lived.”
—The Boston Globe

Tom Curran ’81 accompanies his documentary film, Adrift, to showings and film festivals from Denver and Boston to Anchorage and beyond.

Gathering awards and recognition as it profoundly connects with viewers across the country, Adrift explores the scope and impact of Tom’s late father’s legacy, particularly his expectations for Tom, the first-born. Tom is present, with audiences, as they watch and as they react afterwards, because he wants to reach out and extend the efficacy of a powerful film. Adrift puts in play the difficulty experienced especially by boys and men, in expressing emotions such as fear and grief. In Tom’s case, his “personal battles with fear, risk, success and failure” brought his career to the point of dysfunction. Adrift is one outcome of a painful, cathartic and deeply artistic experience.

An Emmy Award-winning cameraman, Tom began work in 1993 on a documentary about the world of striped-bass fishing, working with his two younger brothers in waters off Monomoy Island, Cape Cod. By 1996, as Tom described it, “I had an image system that was building which was not really about fishing.” Five years of work followed, figuring out the questions that pressed in on Tom and seeking their resolution, in art.

Ultimately, the film sensitively builds upon stunning natural photography of Alaska, Cape Cod and Belize and the metaphorical themes embedded within the views. As The Boston Globe, describes Adrift, it weaves “voiceover memories, interviews with [Tom’s] mother and siblings, home videos, artful recreations, and evocative images – a drive along the Alaska coast, a cormorant under a bridge – into a lingering portrait of paternity.”

Thomas senior, Tom’s father, was a bigger-than-life, hard-driving character, a charismatic Irishman who passionately loved politics, athletics and his family. His own father had died at 40, and had left him with the challenge to “be number one,” and take care of his mother and siblings. This near-death message from his father was a driving force in his life.

To each other, Tom III and his father were the most important figures on earth. Tom sought out any and all opportunities to be with his father, relishing the closeness and the connection. During nearly every moment they were together, Tom’s father coached young Tom in hockey, centering in him the importance of being number one and of winning – at all costs. Tom’s father lived only until he was 37, and died after a period of illness and decline tracked by his family.
Tom did not cry at his father’s death. Instead, he made a promise to honor his father’s wish by becoming an athlete in “the big leagues.” Tom’s life at Milton and in college was devoted to reaching for what his father wanted of him – after hockey was baseball, and then tennis. When the athletic big leagues proved outside his grasp, Tom brought the same drive to his work as a cameraman, earning an Emmy Award at 28. An extremely challenging assignment with a camera crew in Belize brought Tom to the inescapable point of having to consider the source of his own battles with fear, risk, success and failure. Over time, the grip of his father on Tom’s life emerged, and the effect of sublimating emotional responses to his father’s death.
From 1996, when it was clear that film on the world of bass-fishing (Night Train) was developing into a quite a different story, until 2001, Tom worked to realize Adrift. Several Milton graduates helped Tom fulfill this artistic expression, including Jessica Hallowell Lindley, Jide Zeitlin, Josh Bixler (all ’81), and Llewelyn Smith ’72, a seasoned, accomplished and award-winning documentary producer, director, and writer helped Tom translate his life story to the film’s narrative. He advised Tom to begin by writing notes – everything he could remember – about his life. Those notes, the subject of raw interviews with Lew, ultimately became the film’s narration.

Tom drew his sister Maeve, brothers Gavin ’86 and Desmond ’84, and his mother Mary Jane into the interviews, and all contribute to the drawing of a man whose impact on the family, and on friends, was profound. Tom takes questions from the audience after the film, and often the questioners probe the reactions of Tom’s family members to his attempt to make sense of their father in a film.

The film sets up a deep reflective silence among viewers, as well, perhaps because of how easy it is to identify with a story so striking, so intimate and so painful. Eventually the questions do pour out, and Tom answers – quietly and honestly.

With the film’s release, Tom and a number of professionals and interested individuals are developing outreach initiatives tied to local television broadcasts of the film and designed to:
• -Explore the prevailing messages around manhood that adults and youth have internalized.
• -Re-cast the role of parents, coaches, and other important adults in facilitating healthy emotional development in boys.
• Help boys and men safely express and release profound, though forbidden, feelings of humiliation, fear, anger and grief.
• -Reframe sports and other activities of connection for youth to be an opportunity for healthy expression of feelings, authenticity, and character building.
The film’s powerful message is especially for adults, Tom says, and particularly for fathers.

Cathleen Everett

Photos courtesy of the film's Web site: adrift-movie.com