When Andrea Gibson begins to recite one of the poems in in the quiet of their own home in “Come See Me in the Good Light,” it can feel as if they’re building a cocoon around you with their words. The camera will occasionally spins around to channel the energy of the verses, all delivered with the the perfect pitch to be expected of Colorado’s poet laureate, but the delicacy of the words and the impenetrable thread they come to form creates a genuinely tactile hold as if receiving a second invitation into the home Gibson shares with their partner Meg Falley into some deeper inner sanctum.
True to Gibson’s desire never to be too flowery — in pursuing a career as a spoken word artist, they figured it would be easier to reach the masses if she used language that no one would have to strain to understand, “Come See Me in the Good Light” takes on the casual beauty of its setting in Longmont, a quiet town that sits just under the Rockies where Andrea and Meg reside and have been mostly confined since the former received a devastating diagnosis of ovarian cancer. The physical toll of the disease itself is only hinted at in Ryan White’s deeply moving doc — during a hospital visit, a nurse will tell Andrea, it’s nice to see her out of a wheelchair and some old iPhone videos will show Andrea at varying weight and amount of hair through chemotherapy, but it’s the emotional limbo for the couple that is most trying, especially when they can check every three weeks on Andrea’s blood levels to see if they’re doing better or worse, which neither can be sure is a blessing or a curse when the results certainly determine how they both feel until the next test.
White, director of “Good Night Oppy” and “The Case Against Eight,” has arguably never made something on such an intimate scale before, but it’s to the film’s benefit that he never sees Andrea and Meg’s story as a small one. (The biographies he’s made before have been about Pamela Anderson and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and one of his most charming films “Good Ol’ Freda” may have been limited in terms of materials, but did have The Beatles when it delved into the archives of the band’s longtime secretary Freda Kelly.) Although White and cinematographer Brandon Somerhalder rarely leave the house as Andrea wonders whether it would be safe to tour in their compromised condition, the film roams about in the elasticity of the relationship that Andrea and Meg have that has allowed them to confront such wild emotional swings together without breaking. The instinct to keep an eye on whichever one isn’t speaking in any given scene is rewarding time and again.
When both are spoken word artists, Gibson and Falley never have trouble articulating any internal feelings they have, giving “Come See Me in the Good Light” an unusual leg up as far as connecting with a broader audience, surely knowing not only exactly how to phrase things exactly how they’d want, but conscious of how gently to put such difficult things into context. White rarely spends time with anyone else, but in one of the film’s more intriguing threads, outlines the way in which Gibson has steadily built a family of their own over the years from ex-romantic partners who continue to act as a support system and no anomaly in the Queer community where many are disconnected from biological relatives. The director and editor Berenice Chavez are careful never to throw too much at the audience at once, gracefully inserting Andrea and Meg’s history into the proceedings and letting the compassion the two show in their daily lives towards one another carry weight more than any single moment, a lovely tribute to a couple that has come to see even the most mundane of them as precious.
“Come See Me in the Good Light” does not yet have U.S. distribution.