In A Dream

City Paper Grade: A

by Shaun Brady

DREAMSCAPE: Famed Philly artist Isaiah Zagar's tumultuous life is chronicled by his son, Jeremiah, in In a Dream.

City paper grade: [A]

Stepping into Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, Isaiah Zagar's mosaic-covered courtyard on South Street, is akin to entering an alternate reality, one in which life is reflected in vivid colors, fractured mirrors and folksy portraits. Although his work is ubiquitous around Philly, it is the most private of public art, recording the story of his and his family's inner and outer lives on walls throughout the city. As his son Jeremiah captures in his lovingly clear-eyed doc, Zagar himself dwells in a world apart represented by those detail-filled, tiled walls, but has found himself far less capable of existing in the one he shares with the rest of us. Jeremiah trained his camera on Isaiah at his mother Julia's urging, and even in the early going manages to capture both his warmth and the darker shadings of someone who others may dismiss as an eccentric. The pain reaches even deeper as the story unfolds, however, as the revelation of an affair threatens to splinter the family. The remainder of the film is an almost too-personal peek inside that process, depicted with a tender intimacy perhaps possible only with someone on the inside holding the camera. Jeremiah strikes a delicate balance between empathy and honesty, exposing the family's darkest secrets — his brother's drug addiction, his father's memories of molestation, attempted suicide and madness — but never losing sight of their basic humanity. Isaiah's confession of his infidelity, at first to his filmmaker son and then to his wife, happens on camera, but unlike too many memoir-docs it doesn't feel contrived or exploitative. Instead, the act of filming seems to afford a distance to this self-confessed "sensualist," a means to instantly convert the experience into art. And Jeremiah does just that, tumbling raw personal moments, biography and depictions of Isaiah's art into his own stunning mosaic, resonating with his father's work without clumsily aping it.

- Shaun Brady