Testament

In the intervening years since its 1983 release, much of the commentary on Testament has taken pains to contextualize the film within the era it was made: the apex of Reagan versus Russia atomic brinksmanship. Such a macro-minded strategy makes perfect sense, but it also presents in global terms what is essentially a local level story, that of a family and their neighbors weathering the ultimately un-weatherable after effects of a nuclear exchange.

Lynn Littman’s quietly powerful film unfolds in the fashion of a small-scale theater production, one that reflects its American Playhouse roots. The first twenty minutes are quotidian in the extreme and focus on the daily routines of the Wetherly clan, residents of Hamlin, a small hamlet near San Francisco. Scenes of the father Tom (William Devane) cycling with son Brad alternate with mother Carol’s (Jane Alexander) efforts preparing the other two Wetherly children for school and, later in the day, assisting with a school production of The Pied Piper. Others in the community also receive introduction including Kevin Costner and Rebecca DeMornay as the Pitkins, a pair of new parents, and veteran character actor Mako as a gas station owner with a developmentally disabled son. It’s a typical neighborhood in a typical American town. Littman gives almost no foreshadowing of the horrors in store other than the degree of initial normalcy imparted by her setting.

The attack comes in discomfortingly subdued form. The children’s afternoon cartoon program is interrupted first by static and then by an emergency response message announcing missile strikes on the Eastern seaboard. The screen goes blank and several blindingly bright flashes of irradiated light bathe Carol and the kids as they cower on their living room floor. The scenes that follow are similarly muted. No blast ravaged cityscapes that were the defining visuals of contemporaneous films like Threads and The Day After. No riotous scenes of mass panic and violence. No sky-scraping mushroom clouds. Just dazed people pouring out onto still tree-lined streets and attempting to process the magnitude of what has happened. In this respect the film oddly echoes an archaic antecedent, Panic in Year Zero, with armageddon arriving not amidst thunderously destructive bedlam but with a deleterious whisper.

An elderly couple with the fortitude to have stocked supplies and a short wave radio becomes the initial focal point for the populace. Through their reports, the citizens learn that much of the continental United States has been destroyed. Even with this calamitous news things still remain relatively status quo in Hamlin. Only in the ensuing days does society start to fray and fall apart and it’s in this thematic departure that the film truly transmits its devastating power.

Carol attempts to maintain the routines in the absence of Tom, who was at work at the time of the attack and has subsequently not returned home. A breakfast conversation revolves around radiation, with the children wondering what is safe to eat and drink. The ineffectual conjecture that follows brings the sitting duck nature of Carol’s situation painfully into focus. Supplies begin to dwindle and people fall ill. The radiation attacks unceremoniously and without preference. Carol’s sanity begins to falter with the realization of her utter helplessness. The remainder of the film documents a prolonged slide into the abyss, as her attempts to keep her children healthy and safe repeatedly fail. On the Beach depicted such a zero-sum end game, but Littman’s unflinching application of the scenario to a nuclear family unit makes the reality all the more harrowing and bleak. The fate of Carol and her kids is sealed. The film’s unremittingly downbeat denouement hammers home the certainty of atomic insanity with a force that belies the subtlety of the means used to impart it.