Draft:Running Stumbled

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Running Stumbled
Directed by	John Maringouin
Screenplay by	John Maringouin
Produced by	Molly Lynch
Starring	Johnny Roe Jr. Virgie Marie Pennoui
Edited by	John Maringouin Molly Lynch
Release dates	January 25, 2006 (2006-01-25) (International Film Festival Rotterdam) June 10, 2006 (2006-06-10) (CineVegas Film Festival (US premiere)) October 2006 (2006-10) (BFI London Film Festival) July 27, 2007 (2007-07-27) (United Kingdom)
Running time	85 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Running Stumbled is a 2006 American documentary film written and directed by John Maringouin. The film documents Maringouin's return to his estranged father's home in Terrytown, Louisiana where he finds his father, Johnny Roe Jr., a Dadaist painter and drug addict, living in chaotic co-dependence with his common-law wife of nine years, Virgie Marie Pennoui. Shot primarily on digital video in 2002, the film is structured in 13 chapters and blends documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.

Maringouin himself has described the film as "a verité Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but with the filmmaker as the invisible son behind the camera."

The film received a nomination for the Truer than Fiction Award at the 23rd Independent Spirit Awards.

Background

John Maringouin was raised apart from his biological father, Johnny Roe Jr., a Dadaist painter based in the New Orleans suburb of Terrytown, Louisiana. Roe had been charged with the attempted murder of his son (Maringouin) following a car crash; father and son had been estranged ever since, and Maringouin had long since dropped his father's surname.

In 2002, Maringouin received a call from the authorities reporting that his father's home was in disarray. He returned to Terrytown for the first time in 25 years, bringing a camera. What he found was Roe living in squalor with his common-law wife Virgie Marie Pennoui, who claimed to be both cancer-stricken and suicidal, surrounded by the detritus of their derailed lives.

At the time of the film's release, Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine reported that Johnny Roe was still alive, had separated from Pennoui, resumed painting, and was living in a FEMA trailer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Film

The film opens with images of the burned ruins of the Roe family home before moving back in time to document the household as it existed in 2002, when Maringouin returned with a camera. The film is structured in 13 carefully selected chapters, each averaging approximately five minutes, shot on digital video and Super 8. Maringouin subjects the material to extensive post-processing, including pixilation, solarization, and colour filtration, giving the film a hallucinatory quality that the ICA London described as "an unsettling, sometimes surreal domestic disturbance."

Two bookending chapters, shot in heavily filtered red tones, are the film's only scripted sections: the first shows Maringouin arriving unannounced at the home on Easter Sunday; the second shows him telling his father the true extent of the motives behind making the film.

Maringouin himself barely appears onscreen. Rather than staging a father-son reconciliation, the film immerses the viewer in the domestic world of Roe and Pennoui, their arguments, their pharmaceutical haze, their moments of dark comedy and sudden violence. The UnionDocs programme notes described the film as "a dark, Southern Gothic fable, as dramatic as it is cautionary, enveloped in an atmosphere that has its main characters chasing demons and pursued by death." A supporting presence is Stanley Laviolette, Roe's neighbour, who appears caring for his elderly mother and obsessing over the correct prayers for her to recite.

Pennoui is last seen being taken to hospital and subsequently moved to a mental ward. The family home was later destroyed in a fire prior to Hurricane Katrina.

Critical reception

Running Stumbled holds a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Writing in Variety, Robert Koehler called it a "remarkable filmmaking debut" and compared it directly to Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, noting that unlike Caouette, Maringouin largely removes himself from the frame, choosing to observe rather than confess. Writing for IndieWire, Mark Olsen described the film as crafted "like an exorcism," adding that even those who did not respond to it "couldn't seem to stop talking about it."

Writing in Filmmaker Magazine, Scott Macaulay selected Maringouin for the publication's annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" feature, describing Running Stumbled as "a true epic in the fucked-up family doc genre" and noting that Maringouin's most striking choice was his decision to largely remove himself from the frame, "refusing to turn himself into a dramatic character or treat his return to his past as any kind of narrative plot point."

Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette, writing in The Guardian, described watching the film as "a shocking experience," noting that Roe was presented as "almost wholly unrepentant of his misdeeds."

In 2019, MUBI paired the film with Ghostbox Cowboy in a curated double bill titled "Strange Travels: A John Maringouin Double Bill," describing Maringouin as a filmmaker with "a shape-shifting and immersive style, deceptively frenetic in both form and content, to take an interest in the people on the flipside of the American Dream."