In this documentary about siblings in a classical music ensemble, one of the girls, then in her early teens, describes herself as “optimistic and happy.” The all-Americanness of the three sisters and two brothers who came to be known as the 5 Browns manifested itself in a variety of ways. Born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and raised in Utah, they were avatars of well-scrubbed cheer and hard work. Home-schooled, each one practiced piano at all hours.
Their professional performances were both novel and impractical, playing five-piano arrangements of canonical classical music. Doing the sort of thing you don’t expect to see done at all, let alone done well, is also, arguably, very all-American.
“The 5 Browns,” directed by Ben Niles and expanding on a short he made two years ago, is subtitled “Digging Through The Darkness.” The Brown sisters — Desirae, Deondra and Melody — were sexually abused by their father, Keith, from girlhood into their teens.
The idea of the siblings performing together as a unit really came about only after a 2000 New York Times article about how all the children were attending Juilliard simultaneously. After the act got underway, Keith Brown became the business manager and put his children on a punishing schedule, keeping up the abuse for much of the time. Once the sisters revealed what was going on to one another, and to their brothers, Gregory and Ryan, there had to be a reckoning.
And so there was, one that led to further trouble, and one inarguably just resolution: Keith Brown is serving a prison sentence. This story is in a sense confounding. I can’t imagine the bitterness of having to deal with one’s vocation and artistic calling being inextricably linked to a monstrous, criminal upbringing. And yet the movie is framed by scenes of the now adult Browns making a new record. For as much as they suffered, music was able to keep them sane, and united.
The director and his editor, Amanda Larson, construct the movie in a fairly conventional way, but leave a single string dangling, which they pull tight to devastating emotional effect near the end. The five Browns are likable, admirable individuals; two of the sisters started the Foundation for Surviving Abuse, an advocacy group, and we see them at work with eloquence and compassion. Their trauma and their subsequent resolve, as depicted here, are also, finally, all-American.
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‘The 5 Browns: Digging Through the Darkness’
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.