It's powerful - but can you watch it?

We started watching "Tarnation" and it took only about 20 minutes (23 I think to be exact) before we gave up - the movie sounded promising, and many have liked it, but not for me. Chouatte's film, a documentary about his schizophrenic mother and disturbed family and his own troubles and grieving, using lots of collected footage from home movies, seemed to be in the tradition of a few other films I've liked, e.g., Finding the Friedmans, Dear Zachary, that one about the family in which the father remarries late in life... - but this one so dark and in a way over the top, with at times just way too much film effect, quick cuts and dissolves, millions of steps to dress up the otherwise mundane look of home movies (he should have let the images alone, let them speak for themselves), and other sections told almost entirely by words on screen. It's a feat, I guess, an assemblage, a collage or mosaic about a ruined life - but despite its strengths there's no remove, no perspective on the material. A critique could be that the director is too close to the material, and of course that's his point - but I'm not sure that makes it watchable for most viewers, at least not for me. Unlike some of the other documentaries about family breakdowns, there is (intentionally) no mystery here. We get the facts right up front, we see the disturbed mother in the first clip and quickly learn her back story, so we feel great pity for her and for Chouatte (sp?), but limited interest and engagement. I was not surprised that Gus Van Sant was a producer - his overly engaged film stay (Elephant, Paranoid Park) is a big influence here. I prefer more simple and direct statements, in all forms of art.