As I understand it, in last year's semi-sensation of a personal documentary, Tarnation, the opening and closing scenes were in fact staged - not for the documentary, but for a short film director Jonathan Caouette was making, starring himself, his boyfriend (as his boyfriend), his mother (as his mother) and his family's vast archives of home movies. That short film was eventually overtaken by the true story, but had he continued with the fiction, the result might have been something vaguely akin to what Andrew Wagner has created with The Talent Given Us.

This is a film about an elderly couple, played by Judy Wagner and Allen Wagner, who begin to reminisce on their lives, which they are beginning to realize may be coming to an end; Allen has had a stroke and has trouble speaking, and Judy is plagued by the sudden realization that she may have been a bad mother to their three children, and that she didn't live the life she wanted (they remind me in many ways of Enid and Alfred, the parents in Jonathan Frazner's novel The Corrections). Acting on a series of spur-of-the-moment decisions, the abruptly find themselves on a road trip from their home in New York to Los Angeles to visit their screenwriter son, with whom they've lost contact. They're accompanied by their two adult daughters, Emily and Maggie, who are both actresses, one more successful than the other and both convinced that their mother loved their brother more than them. All three women are remarkably frank about their misgivings, personal grudges and sexual frustrations; to the irritation of Allen, his mini-van becomes an estrogen fueled therapy session on wheels.

This is funny at times, mildly annoying at others; road trips with family members can be tiresome, even when one is not a member of the family in question. Where it gets intriguing, however, is when one realizes that Judy and Allen, who use their real names, are in fact the parents of Andrew; their daughters, naturally, are his sisters. Many people feel increasingly disconnected from their family as they grow older; Wagner has, in effect, enabled a reconnection by sending his parents on this journey to find him. Is it because he is a good director that he's able to draw such strong, nearly flawless performances from his parents and siblings? Or is it simply because he is their son and younger brother? Regardless, there's an incredible - and at times uncomfortable - amount of trust on display here.

Where the film is most successful is in sustaining any disbelief that this is not, in fact, a documentary. It's shot on low fidelity digital video, and looks like a home movie - an aesthetic we've come to associate with being 'real.' The performances, particularly by Judy and Allen (neither of whom had ever acted, or even considered acting, before this film), offer no clues as to what is fictive or not. Wagner did write a screenplay, but if, for example, he made the character of his sister an actress on E.R., as she is in real life, then is it safe to assume that Judy and Allen's frank discussions of infidelity may also be rooted in fact?

It is precisely because it is unclear how much the line between fiction and reality has been blurred that The Talent Given Us is a fascinating film; that it is often moving, or sometimes grating, is almost beside the point once one considers the context in which the film was made. Indeed, while the story is, on one level, about looking for a son, there's an entire meta-narrative in which the son is in fact in the van, traveling across the country with the rest of his family, filming them as they pretend he's not there. A behind-the-scenes documentary for this film could be just as good as the film itself - and might also, I'd bet, include a lot of the same footage.