A Midwife’s Tale is a low budget, low production value docudrama that aired in 1997 as part of the PBS
American Experience series. The film was based on Laurel Ulrich's 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning book
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.
The structure of the film is unusual with 6 different components. (1) Historical reenactment with dialogue. (2) Historical reenactment with a voice over by the Martha Ballard character. (3) Historical reenactment with voice over by Laurel Ulrich. (4) Historical reenactment with no dialogue but usually with soundtrack music or occasionally sound effects. (5) Laurel Ulrich's voice over while she is working with the diary. (6) Laurel Ulrich with dialogue.
It is the last two categories that also makes the film a documentary about Ulrich and what she has accomplished on interpreting history through the documents of ordinary people. Previous historians dismissed the diary as full of trivia, but Ulrich loved the diary that was full of details. But Ulrich is limited in what she can say without appearing egotistical or self-absorbed. A good documentary biographical film would need the point of view of people who know Ulrich or who are experts in historical research. Ulrich isn't going to tell us how in a 1976 article about Puritan funeral services, she included the phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history." The phrase went viral in an era without social media. Today it still can be seen on T-shirts, bumper stickers and signs at protest demonstrations. Ulrich is not going tells us how her work has influenced younger generations of historians and the effect she had on her peers and older historians who began using the lives of ordinary people to develop complex historical issues. The time it would take to show clips from a few interviews about Ulrich would be nowhere near as long as the time saved by eliminating the cooking, animals grazing, washing clothes and other scenes that don't advance the story.
The multi-structure is very effective in the sequence about the social and economic changes Martha experienced towards the end of the 18th Century. Through Ulrich's voice over and reenactment with no dialogue, we learn that the last of her daughters had married and she became dependent on hired help. Through reenactment with dialogue we observe the verbal conflict that ensues when Martha criticizes the work quality of her hired worker at the spinning wheel. A voice over of Ulrich explains about the changes in the political order with less deference to authority and more political rights. To Martha and her husband these gains were experienced as a loss. In reenactment but with no dialogue the tension between Martha and her worker in observed through facial expressions. The sequence ends with Martha in voice over saying that she is "determined not to pay girls anymore for ill manners." The shifts are seamless. Ulrich provides the interpretation of the events while Martha in voice over quotes from the diary.
Docudramas had their heyday in police procedurals during the Film Noir era.
The narrator typically in a deep Voice of God style explains the details of police forensics, the significance of small clues, and how the criminal thinks.
The House on 92nd Street (1941) was based on bringing down the Nazi Duquesne Spy Ring. It was one of the top grossing films but was poorly received with negative reviews when released on DVD in 2005. The style became so successful with films like
13 Rue Madeleine (1947),
Boomerang (1947),
Call Northside 777 (1948), that it was used for fictional crime films. After Jack Webb worked in
He Walked by Night (1947), he brought the style to the television series
Dragnet that he created, produced and starred in.
Documentary biographies are still made but they are usually screened in smaller chains like Landmark Theaters, United Artists Theatres, or the Laemmle Theatres in the Los Angeles area. Production costs are low with no high paid actors or special effects. Good quality interviews can be made on location with two soft light boxes, a lavalier microphone, and a $5,000 or less prosumer camcorder. To film narrative biographies, a considerably larger budget is needed for set design, wardrobe, lighting, gaffers, best boy, grips, a myriad of assistants, location permits and insurance. The bare bones budget, of
A Midwife's Tale is painfully noticeable in the reenactments.
There are times when the voice over doesn't work well. Ulrich turns the pages of the diary and reads names and events from the diary, the directly recorded sound is synchronized to Ulrich's lips. Abruptly voice over sound cuts in as she laments that she doesn't know what Martha looks like. The voice over doesn't synch with her lips. It is particularly noticeable because it occurs during a close up when her lips are filling a significant amount of the screen.
Unfortunately, the film wastes considerable time when there is no voice-over or dialogue. There are scenes of animals grazing, people cooking or doing laundry, ink being made, or Martha walking along the beach to get in her canoe. These shots use significant screen time and don't advance the story. The viewer who wants to learn about daily or artisanal colonial activities should consider a visit to a living history museum like Colonial Williamsburg.
Kaiulani Lee, an American, delivers the lines of Martha Ballard with the accent she uses in performing the play she wrote,
Can't Scare Me...the Story of Mother Jones. This one person performance about the Irish born American labor activist Mary Harris Jones continues on the high school and university circuit. What accent would Martha Ballard have had? She was born in Oxford, Massachusetts halfway between Boston and Springfield. My mother who was born in Springfield in 1916 didn't have a Boston accent and spoke a neutral regional free American English. My father who was born in Boston had a very strong accent. I grew up on the North Shore of Boston and friends and relatives would ask her why she didn't talk like us. She would say that the Connecticut River was the accent dividing line. Since Martha Ballard's parents, Dorothy Learned Moore and Capt. Elijah Moore were both born in Oxford, Massachusetts, the question is: Did Martha speak like people in Boston or people from Springfield? The Irish accent created by Kaiulani Lee is an unlikely fantasy.
Martha like many midwives had a bias against male physicians interfering in cases that she considered normal. There is a scene of a woman having her first baby who is exhausted and screaming. Despite Martha telling her it is early in labor, she wants the doctor summoned. Martha makes a non-approving expression and because the attendants were intimidated, the doctor was called. Martha is not happy that he gave her twenty drops of laudanum (10% tincture of opium, that at 20 drops is the equivalent to about 150mg of Demerol). Martha complained that" it put her into such a stupor that the pains that were regular and promising stopped till near night," Ulrich explains that Dr. Page was a new doctor in town and wanted to be involved in normal obstetrics and that Martha considered him a "bungler." The contractions resumed and Martha delivered a normal baby.
In an era before antibiotics, IV hydration, anesthesia and Cesarean Sections, maternal exhaustion could be lethal. The uterine muscles become fatigued and labor progress ceases. Therapeutic rest with a narcotic would temporarily stop the dysfunctional contractions and later effective contractions would return.
Martha is practicing midwifery at a time when obstetrics is becoming part of the medical field in Boston. Harvard Medical School was established in 1782. The Boston Lying-In Hospital, one of America's first maternity hospitals opened in 1832, twenty years after Martha died.
A Midwife's Tale is often screened as part of courses on women's studies. Martha Ballard frequently gets glorified as if she were
Straight Outta Little House on the Prairie. In addition to her conflicts with Dr. Page and her hired domestic help, she has anger about her economic situation from a decreasing number of deliveries. Her husband is referred to as a rank Tory; a slur that he is not a Patriot but a Loyalist to England. After her alcoholic son gets into a fight at the supper table, Martha makes the sexist entry into her diary, "it is very strange that men cannot behave as rational beings."
The film is similar to visitor center films at historic sites. The National Park Service introductory films are about an hour shorter than
A Midwife's Tale. Reenactment portions rarely stand alone without voice over or credits. Gone are the days of watching soldiers' marching, shooting and reloading. At Gettysburg, arguably the most complex battle of the Civil War to comprehend, the introductory video in the auditorium is only 20 minutes long. More detailed videos run among the exhibits.
On a positive note the shooting location for the film was fantastic and gave the movie a background authenticity. Kings Landing, a living museum in Prince William, New Brunswick was used. It is about 175 miles from Hollowell, Maine. The Saint John's River at Kings Landing substituted for the Kennebec River at Hollowell.
A Midwife's Tale, unless it undergoes a remake with a new structure, will continue to be relegated for classroom viewing. Putting clips of the film into a narrative or documentary biography about Laurel Ulrich might be its path to a wider audience.
