It’s hard to trust anyone’s impulse to build and live in a castle. Feels like royalty worship. And a castle is cold, not warm like a home, and is built as a defensive structure, to keep others out. For Alan and late wife Adrianne, it was all part of their aspiring aristocrat roleplay. Alan loves Adrianne so dearly and purely that he devoted his life to becoming her patron, as though she were Art Herself, the center of his world. Adrianne was colorful, bold, part glam show-off and part drag performer, the couple’s castle was an ode to their unique and big love.
They had the kind of love that only had room for two people. The kind of love that is already too full to contain outside family and friends. The dynamic dyad filled each other with each other. They said, Alan was the flagpole and she was the bright flag, they were perfectly anchored as a couple.
It begins to make sense why a castle. It can contain and protect their love within, without the scrutiny of anyone else’s ideas, a certain reverence for their own partnership, that it deserved this tribute. It’s a sweet thing for them, for sure, but feels discomforting as an audience, like it’s too much vouyerism.
The documentary functions as a hybrid, as a musical film is created within the normal walls of a documentary, about their love and relationship. It’s like building one more monument for their relationship. The couple, as Art themselves, is one way they would allow the outside world to perceive them.
Adrianne and the Castle is sweet stuff. As a dedication to partnership, it sings on high the merits of coupling. It has no shame. This is a gaudy and heavily ornamented celebration of life. You can’t take that away from anyone. Bless them. Within this space, it lets us in: we see the castle walls adorned with adorations, we begin to understand the meaning of the 30-year partnership and how their love could fill 64 whole rooms of a castle.
Between the reenactments, home videos, interviews, and musical recreations, you begin to feel what the couple must have felt for each other. From the outside in, this feels like a flex of wealth, but wealth used for the purpose of veneration. This is a very personal memorial. What it achieves as a documentary is not always fully clear, but you do feel let in, and begin to understand the lives of some people who were very rich in money and in love.