“You don’t have to be famous to be special.” This line, uttered near the end of Alison Tavel’s heartwarming doc “Resynator,” feels like the thesis statement for a lot of these kinds of filmmaking-as-family-confessional exercises. Whether it’s “Dick Johnson is Dead,” “Last Flight Home,” or even “Sr.,” the basic components are simple: Take a filmmaker, whether acclaimed or veteran, and let them film a personal project about their strained, halting relationship with their parent. Add some animation, some confessional narration, a smattering of home movies, and a few talking heads from people who knew them, bing bang boom, send it to SXSW. But while “Resynator” hews closely along these formulas, there’s something infectious about the way it does it, and the emotional honesty with which it engages with its central story, that, well, resonates as deeply as those aforementioned examples.
The story begins and ends with Tavel, a twentysomething touring musician whose unassuming, charming screen presence proves a welcome escort through her family’s life story. All her life, she’s wondered about her late father, Don Tavel, who died when she was ten weeks old in a car accident; she’d grown up being told that he invented the synthesizer, only to learn that that wasn’t strictly true. However, he did invent something called the Resynator, a synth-like prototype that converts organic sounds into electronic ones. While he poured lots of time and money into hype and marketing for it (even earning the attention of Peter Gabriel at one point), the device ended up dead in the water. Long thought lost, the device ends up in Ali’s hands when she finds it in an attic. And so it goes, as Tavel attempts to piece the Resynator back together, just as she does her understanding of her father.
As a music-tech nerd, there’s a lot to like in “Resynator”; watching Tavel and her cohorts pick away at the device, marveling at it, unearthing new things about its infancy and the marketing, is downright infectious for gearheads who’ve salivated over Minimoogs in the past. As Tavel gets the device working again, we’re treated to a bevy of cameos from artists ranging from Gotye to Fred Armisen trying it out, building to a beautiful montage as a whole generation of artists discover and re-discover this novel new way to make music.
But “Resynator” finds its most sonorous notes when honing in on Tavel and her quest, through repairing the prototype, in repairing her understanding of her parentage. Growing up with a loving stepdad, she was never that motivated to know or understand the real Don; she always knew him as an eccentric with a storied history in music esoterica. As discussions with her mother, her grandmother, his old business partner, and others reveal, “Resynator” paints a fascinatingly incomplete picture of a man in artistic torment. As much of a musical genius as he was, he was haunted by depression, by suicidal thoughts, by a parentage he felt was supportive but hardly loving. Tavel’s peeling back of the onion layers is raw and personal, especially in more than a few raw moments uncovering confessional letters her mother kept from her because “I never wanted her to think badly of him.”
Tavel’s curiosity becomes our own, and she ushers us through each new revelation with a winsome pace; apart from a few dodgy animation sequences that feel superfluous (painting Don as a Superman-type hero representative of Tavel’s adoration of him), “Resynator” clips by quite nicely and paces out its revelations with impressive patience. And in Tavel’s reconstruction of her father, she asks several probing questions of herself: What drives her to rediscover him? Why put this obsolete device back together when it failed to launch in the 1980s? Will bringing the Resynator back to life, in some way, do the same for Don?
Much like the device itself, “Resynator” hardly feels revolutionary among its contemporaries, but there’s enough charm and heart beneath it to make it stand out from a crowded field. The personal doc can often feel stifling and self-congratulatory; Tavel makes it feel personal and disarming, an earnest and sincere attempt to understand herself through the father she never got to know, and the big, plastic box of wires that might bring him closer, even if just a little bit.
