Jonathan Caouette’s “Tarnation’’ — which got four stars and a 10-best slot from me in 2004 — was a groundbreaking autobiographical documentary, assembling home movies, photos, answering-machine tapes, pop songs and TV shows into a riveting collage of the filmmaker’s harrowing life, including a schizophrenic mother, physical abuse and his own suicide attempts.
Caouette revisits the same themes and people with far less impact in “Walk Away Renee.’’ This sequel weaves back and forth in time as it mostly focuses on Caouette moving his manic mother, Renee, in a truck cross-country from a group home that isn’t working out in Houston to another institution much closer to his New York City home.
Things go wrong early on, as three months’ worth of mood-stabilizing medications for Mom somehow go missing and no doctor is willing to write replacement prescriptions. Even when that’s sorted out, doctors warn that lithium, the drug Caouette (who has aged quite visibly from all the stress) has long relied on to level Mom out, may eventually kill her.
The French-funded “Walk Away Renee’’ is produced on a far more elaborate scale than “Tarnation,’’ which Caouette assembled at a cost of $213.32 on his boyfriend’s laptop computer. And that’s mostly not a good thing.
The extra money has bought a professional crew for scripted sequences, in which Jonathan and his mother too often mug for the camera. There are also elaborate, “Tree of Life’’-style effects for an ill-advised science-fiction subplot that further distances this follow-up from reality.