Fireflies in the Garden 2008

At the heart of this intimate family drama is the fraught relationship between Charles Waechter and his son Michael Waechter, two people stubbornly pushing each other away across decades. On a boyhood road trip, young Michael claims to have lost his glasses, knowing he has them in his pocket, and Charles makes him walk home in the rain as punishment. This early clash sets a pattern of rule-breaking and tit-for-tat that threads through their lives. Jane Lawrence, the much younger sister of Charles’s wife Lisa Waechter, stays with them while Lisa is pregnant, and the baby turns out to be a girl named Ryne. Jane has been close with Michael since childhood and sides with him against Charles.

Years pass, but the tension remains. Michael embarrasses his father in front of colleagues by falsely claiming to have written “Fireflies in the Garden,” a poem by Robert Frost. Charles responds with a harsh punishment, forcing him to hold his arms out horizontally as they strain to bear the weight. Jane feeds Michael when he cannot lift his aching arms, and the family conflict escalates until Michael intervenes in a quarrel between his parents and forces Charles to the ground.

Later, in present day, Ryne, now a college senior, picks up Michael at the airport. Charles and Lisa drive to Jane’s house for a party to celebrate Lisa’s college graduation, but tragedy strikes when Charles swerves to avoid hitting Christopher Lawrence, Jane’s son, and the car slams into a telephone pole, killing Lisa and severely injuring Charles.

Michael tries to comfort Christopher and Leslie, Jane’s daughter, by telling them Jane was his best friend before she was their mother. He takes them fishing with firecrackers, and then urges them to lie to their mother about the outing. Jane chastises him lovingly after learning the truth, while Charles chastises him in anger.

Things come to a head when Michael has noisy sex with Kelly Hanson, his alcoholic ex-wife, who attends the funeral. He later learns that Lisa had been having an affair with her professor Addison and planned to leave Charles after graduation. Motivated to stop hurting his father, Michael uses the title of the Frost poem as the title of his memoir about his childhood—“Fireflies in the Garden”—and destroys the manuscript to sever the painful link between their past and present.