A Midwife's Tale

Bostonians get an early taste of this impressive collaboration of local talent on the MFA's big screen (it's slated to air on PBS in early 1998). Director Richard Rogers, writer-producer Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, and author Laurel Ulrich (whose award-winning book about 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard inspired the screenplay) have produced a moving, intelligent film that defies categorization. Mixing filmed interviews with dramatic re-enactments, A Midwife's Tale presents Ulrich's process of discovery with as much impact as the story she's uncovering. Martha Ballard was the wife of a surveyor who moved to rural Maine, became for all practical purposes the local doctor, lost three of her children to an epidemic, and over two decades watched her career dissipate, as male physicians and "modern medicine" slowly usurped the domain of the midwife/healer. The film's physical detail is authentic and its photography pensive and luminous, as it blends genres, illuminating the world of an ordinary woman with warmth and simplicity. At the Museum of Fine Arts.

-- Peg Aloi