Given the many personalities in all our families and the way we often all perceive past traumatic events differently, making a probing documentary about your own family sh*t could end up either highly damaging to those relationships, exploitative of genuine pain, self-serving, or in some cases, very navel-gazing. And yet filmmaker Ry Russo-Young’s terrific new HBO documentary series, “Nuclear Family,” avoids all those familiar trappings, instead crafting something just extraordinarily intimate, personal, and deeply captivating.
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“Nuclear Family” is a clever double entendre here, speaking to the ways Russo-Young’s family was as conventional and loving as any other regular family—even if it wasn’t at all seen as such at the time—but also how a nuclear-sized event in the family’s history, threatened the core of the family and clearly traumatized all of the individuals in the unit for years to come.
In its most condensed form, the event is not simple to summarize but emotionally cataclysmic and grueling. Russo-Young was the daughter of two lesbian women, Robin Young and Sandy Russo. In the early ’80s, when Young and Russo were looking to get pregnant, they eventually settled on a successful gay lawyer named Tom Steel to be the sperm donor. Young and Russo liked the then-progressive and new idea of a man in the gay community contributing to the creation of their daughter; he was successful, very handsome, and had no interest in being a father—their ideal sperm donor. In 1981, Ry was born, Robin Young being the mother who gave physical birth to her. And this was the second such “experiment,” actually. Years, prior, Cade Russo-Young had been born; also the product of a sperm donation, another man from the gay community, and this time, Sandy Russo was the mother that gave the physical birth to their new daughter.
Around the age of four, a curious and precocious Cade started to inquire about her birth father, and Sandy Russo— who never knew her father and agonized about it for years—hoped to preclude that pain for her daughter. So the two parents decided to invite both male sperm donors to start joining the tribe on family vacations and getaways, slowly integrating into their lives like an uncle or family friend who was lovely to see from time to time. Cade’s biological parent slowly slipped out of the picture, but Tom Steel remained.
But eventually, as everyone becomes closer, Steel becomes more infatuated with Ry, deals with a life-threatening illness, and then suddenly changes his tune abruptly about fatherhood once the Russo-Young family starts putting up some seemingly reasonable boundaries up. (Look, some family requests need to be respected, and it’s not that hard to understand). Steel looking at life through the often myopic lens of a lawyer and feeling entitled, a brutal legal battle ensues when Ry is nine years old.
Understandably, the lawsuit was seen as an attack on the sanctity of their family. Lasting for four long years, the emotional scars of this traumatic event and the sudden terror of losing their daughter—if/when Steel was granted paternity rights, his legal control of Ry could have only grown—would last for a lifetime. The story ran into Ry’s teen years and became rather infamous: a sperm donor suing for paternity rights and almost stripping two mothers of their daughter simply because of antiquated ideas of what traditional, nuclear family values meant. It’s a story that captured the media’s attention in the 1990s and especially in New York when the case took place. So captivating the tale, in 2004, a decade later, the New York Times magazine relitigated the entire affair again in an article called Growing Up With Mom and Mom.
On some levels, the story is cut and dry, and it’s easy to empathize with the mothers and the family scarred from this event: could you imagine inviting a fox into your henhouse and then this interloper suing for legal recognition over the chicks? Unsurprisingly, Young and Russo’s response is a gigantic, unforgiving f*ck you!, and a war to hold onto their daughters, but a battle filled with anxiety, pain, terror, and all kinds of emotional chaos.
But Russo-Young’s impetus to make the documentary and revisit this trauma is more empathetic and attempting-to-be-objective. And much of it, it turns out, motivated by a box of family footage tapes and interview footage Steel recorded at the time to explain his side of things to Ry, that she finally excavated. Too angry and upset to watch it, the tapes are filed away in a closet for over 15 years. Upon revisiting these tapes nearly another decade later—particularly the self-recorded video of Steel telling Ry, “look, there are two sides to every story” — is compelling enough to sway the filmmaker to do just that.
Features a lifetime of home videos, press, and interviews she conducts, Russo-Young takes a compassionate and nuanced look at her family, Steel, his friends, and family and attempts to put together a fair and accurate portrait of what happened and what the intentions of both sides were. And she very much succeeds in that endeavor.
Russo-Young effortlessly intermingles new interviews, old interviews, old archival footage, family archives, and more to create a vast and rich mosaic of a loving childhood that was suddenly interrupted endangered due to a careless lawsuit (nearly unspoken, though finally addressed by one of Tom’s friends is just the stupidity of the case: he never considered the emotional costs and ramifications). The outdated ways of the law and backward-ass societal thinking only made it worse at the time.
Deftly crafting the abundance of content and context she has, newspaper articles, talk show appearances that featured her family discussing what happened to them—a “gay family” and this controversy irresistible to the Phil Donahues and Sally Jesse Raphaels of the world—what emerges, beyond a very moving portrait of a family under threat, and yet the sympathetic perspective of trying to understand the opposing side is a multi-faced doc about gay rights, pioneering families and just the sheer right to exist, which isn’t all that much to ask in retrospect.
What’s brilliant about Russo-Young’s doc is how in its universality, and its relatable ideas about stories that need villains and situations we idealize or romanticize, is how it recontextualizes the notion of American family values and the “nuclear family.” Because her family is just as valid, legitimate, and “normal” as yours. And in her tender, fair, and largely non-judgmental, but honest exploration of the explosion that nearly decimated her family, Russo-Young creates a poignant story about love, loss, need, and the repercussions of some unfortunate choices you can never recover from. [A-]
