Review of The Cathedral, directed by Ricky D’Ambrose

I will admit, I had never heard of The Cathedral until one day I was endlessly scrolling through my various streaming subscriptions instead of sitting down and doing work I should be doing. Something I tend to do when I get like this is the movie version of Russian Roulette for me. I open a streaming platform, close my eyes, and start pressing on the arrows for a minute or two. When I open my eyes, I watch whatever the cursor has landed on (unless I’ve seen it before, then I play another around to get myself watching something completely new). This is how I end up watching a ton of movies I would consider to be outside of my comfort zone, as I try my hardest to get outside of it whenever possible.

So on this boring day, I decided to play movie roulette. I picked MUBI as my platform, and the movie I landed on was The Cathedral. I was open-mouthed when I landed on it because Brian d’Arcy James was on it. I saw him on Broadway when he was playing The Baker in Into the Woods, and that was such a magical experience for me considering the cast at the time (I was awe struck by Patina Miller). But it was at this moment I realized he did film as well!

Let’s get into the review before I keep rambling.

The story of one boy’s upbringing in a wealthy family falling apart.

So our main character in The Cathedral is Jesse Damrosch, who was born in 1987. We begin the movie with his birth, and he will be the only child in the family. That means the rise and fall of these people is documented through his growing up. We see the events of the film through his perspective, but there’s a rather bland voiceover of a woman telling us what’s happening as well. This is typically combined with artifacts from his life.

And when I say artifacts, it’s not just the postcards of the places mentioned they vacation in. Instead, we get an entire quilt of the American experience during the period in which Jesse grows up, and footage from the period gives key context if you’re not into American history or weren’t alive during this time. Some of the key events here are the AIDs epidemic happening in the United States, as Jesse’s own uncle dies from AIDS (this is stated to be around the time Jesse is conceived while on a family trip to the Caribbean), the World Trade Center is bombed in the nineties, and then we also get some George W. Bush footage as well.

All of this said, from the beginning we get a front seat to the drama. This escalates with one side of the family later on, as when someone dies, we meet some people who they refused to talk to for a decade. There are a lot of family members to remember, and because we’re not Jesse and constantly having to interact with some of these people, it becomes difficult to put names to faces.

We also learn early on that Jesse’s grandfather does not approve of his father, which causes some friction to begin with. We know over the course of the movie that it is inevitable that his parents will get divorced, and although Jesse never really speaks any dialogue throughout the film, the narrator tells us about all of the drama and feuds going on in the background. Eventually, his parents do get divorced, becoming a new point of trauma for the young boy.

Overall Thoughts

This is a pretty quiet, straightforward film, but I surprisingly liked it a lot. There is a lot of nuance to a movie like this, and I thought all of the actors really nailed down their characters. d’Arcy James is particularly brimming with this brand of masculine rage throughout the movie that made me uneasy, and when there are scenes when Jesse is older and reflecting on the happier times of his life, all of this began to become clearer to me. Although we don’t get a ton of his voice directly in the movie, it is the essence of viewing everything going on, despite all of the adult problems brewing around him and worsening as time goes on. There’s immense beauty to this throughout, and I enjoyed the picturesque shots scattered throughout the film.

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