Life, Animated

SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: I'm not even going to pretend to be objective in this review, as this documentary film struck so many chords with me on so many different levels that at some point during my viewing of it at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, I just completely abandoned viewing it from a critical eye and went on this real-life journey that reminded me of my own life in ways that were both cathartic and occasionally uncomfortable.

I have been officially diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome since I was five years old, which for those of you who don't know, is a disorder on the mild end of the autism spectrum and is "characterized by higher than average intellectual ability coupled with impaired social skills and restrictive, repetitive patterns of interest and activities." Because of this, for the first few years of my schooling life I would barely talk to anybody; rather, I would get in my head and flesh out stories that I would usually act out with my Thomas the Tank Engine toys. My stories were mostly inspired by random things I would pick up on from watching TV and, of course, Disney movies (my two favorites as a kid being The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast). While part of me is thankful for the fact that I've blessed with the ability to see the world in a unique way and discover telling stories through film as an outlet for creative expression, I also realize the setbacks in my early development, that I was so in-my-own-head as a child and so obsessed with the portrait of love in those Disney movies that I began to adopt that romantic, idealized, and fantastical idea of love as my outlook. I thought that two people sharing a kiss was the most beautiful thing ever, and I couldn't wait until I could kiss someone myself. But as I got older, this outlook on love and romance became dangerous and resulted in several crushing blows of rejection and even some lost friendships. It resulted in me learning that what I struggle with is psychologically refered to as "limerence," which is something I've been seeking help for and will hopefully try to get better at working with.

But anyway, over the last few years I have come to greatly resent Disney for their portrayal of love and romance, and I do believe that it is having a negative effect on some children that watch them (I still hear stories now about young kids who literally cry when they don't get their "crush," something that I'm all too familiar with). But in Life, Animated, Disney movies quite literally give a young boy named Owen Suskind his voice. At the age of three, Owen, who at the time had been seen as a normal happy young boy with an active imagination, just stopped talking. After many doctor's appointments, it turned out that Owen had autism. His parents, understandably, were baffled and didn't know what to do to help him. One of the few things that they could still do as a family was watch the Disney animated classics that Owen always loved, and it was through this that they found a way to communicate with him (there's a reason I'm not getting more specific, and that's because you have to see this movie).

Much like the other brilliant documentary that I discovered at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Nuts!, this doesn't simply rely on talking heads to tell its amazing real-life story. Rather, in keeping with the spirit of the Disney movies at the center of Owen Suskind's life, director Roger Ross Williams utilizes select scenes of animation and clips from various Disney animated classics to allow us to get inside Owen's head and truly come to understand how he sees the world. For example, at one point in the film, he writes a short story called "The Land of the Lost Sidekicks" and casts himself as the protector of Disney sidekicks (including Muchu from Mulan and the Genie from Aladdin) and Williams beautifully brings this story to life with an animated sequence that's as convincing as any Disney animated short played before one of their own films. It really brought to mind how I visualized my stories as a kid (and occasionally do now).

But easily the most gut-punching part of this film, and the one that elevates it beyond the sappy, cutesy after-school-special documentary that it could have been, is how it juxtoposes fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the life of 23-year-old Owen with the fanciful partly-animated Disney-focused sequences. At twenty-three, Owen had just finished school, landed a job at a local Regal multiplex, and was moving out of his parents' house and into a Cape Cod assisted-living facility. However, he was also having to learn some adult lessons that he didn't necessarily get a full grasp on through Disney films. One part of the movie that hit particularly close to home for me was when (spoiler) his girlfriend Emily breaks up with him for being too obsessive toward her. He takes this hard, because of how much she meant to him and how their relationship was his idea of the "true love" he had seen in countless Disney movies. He never does entirely get over this breakup, but it further reminded me of how much I had personally come to resent Disney films for their fantastical portrayal of "true love." Perhaps the most painful scene in the film to watch comes during this part, when Owen's mother has to comfort him when he cries about how it's "not fair" that he has to suffer through the loss of this girl who meant so much to him. His mother then invokes The Hunchback of Notre Dame as an example of a Disney film in which the hero doesn't get the girl (this is one of the few Disney films I've never seen) in an attempt to get Owen to come to terms with this.

This is the type of honesty I really wish more films would dare to come close to (I get that this is a documentary, but still) and I think kids need to be able to understand that the idea of true love in Disney films is not reality and that they're going to get rejected by their crushes most of the time. This is something I still have to grapple with to this day and to see Owen have to go through a similar thing in this film was a profound thing to witness. The film is supposedly going to be getting a Chicago release on July 8, and I honestly think it should be required viewing for every child old enough to go to school (it is rated PG) as it is a brilliant portrayal of not only a child grappling with autism and the healing power of film but also that not everything you see in films should be taken as gospel. And until Disney films decide that they want to reflect reality a little more with their "happily-ever-after" endings, I guess it's going to have to take documentaries like Life, Animated to balance those endings with reality. And maybe that's not such a bad thing as long as kids are able to see them.

Nuts!

SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: One of the reasons I love going to film festivals is because it's really the only time I can walk into a movie and have absolutely no idea what to expect. Thanks to social media and endless trailers and commercials gracing our TV and YouTube screens, the element of surprise when walking into a theatre is virtually gone, even with something like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which caused a lot of my friends to log off of social media due to spoiler alerts. So when I got off of class about a month ago and walked over to Chicago's beautiful Music Box Theatre to see a movie called Nuts!, the title was honestly the only thing I knew about it (other than that it was likely going to be good, because it was in the Chicago Critics Film Festival in the first place).

And because of this, I am going to give as little plot synopsis in this review as I can. The absolute best way to see this film is how I saw it: knowing nothing. But for those who can't stand knowing nothing about a movie before spending $11 on it (and this film is worth every cent of your money), here's just the basic set-up: In the early 1920s, a doctor named John R. Brinkley opened up a health clinic in the small Kansas town of Milford and was very popular among the locals. One day, a man walked into Brinkley's clinic and said he was feeling "sexually weak" (you can take any guess as to what he's trying to imply). While standing there, Brinkley notices a pair of goats mating intensely on a farm across the street, and he jokingly suggests to the man that if he had a pair of "goat nuts" in him, he would have no problem with trying to please his wife. Much to his (and everyone else's) surprise, the man begs Brinkley to perform the operation, and (gasp!) it works!

Oh, and I should also mention that this is a documentary, meaning that John R. Brinkley existed and the events depicted in this movie did actually happen. Yes, goat gland transplantation to cure erectile dysfunction was an actual thing. But like I said, part of the experience of watching this movie is knowing as little as possible, so don't go Googling John R. Brinkley as you'll lose a considerable amount of enjoyment if you do. Because this film blind-sided me in virtually every sense of the word. How there hasn't been a movie on this guy sooner is astonishing, because his story is the very definition of stranger than fiction.

I haven't seen of director Penny Lane's other films (I plan on watching Our Nixon very soon, and yes, Penny Lane is her actual birth certificate name; see pennylaneismyrealname.com/faq), but she seems to have an amazing knack for taking these stranger-than-fiction stories and exposing them for every piece of bizarreness and eccentricity possible. In the hands of a lesser documentarian, this could have easily been just a bunch of talking heads giving a history lesson, and while there are some, she brilliantly utilizes beautiful idiosyncratic animation to tell this story in a way that is at once perfect for the story and entertaining for everyone watching it. Seriously, I don't know who these animators are, but they deserve some kind of filmmaking/animating medal for their contributions to this movie (they won't get Oscars, but they should).

But even more brilliant than the animation in telling this story is the structure she uses. While it's very hard to talk about this without getting into spoilers, all I'll say is that it's one of the most brilliant uses of structure that I've ever seen in a documentary (right up with Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary; which if you haven't seen that, please do yourself a favor) and it punches you right in the gut once you hit the third act. It's like it all of a sudden goes from this bizarre Charlie Kaufman meets P.T. Anderson story to Wes Anderson's version of There Will Be Blood in the best possible way. And if that sounds like too vague of a description for you, that's kind of the intention. No amount of metaphors or analogies can do any sort of justice to the third act of this movie (not even a Google search on Mr. Brinkley, which I beg you not to do until after you see the film), as it is one of the most amazing feats of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen.  

Since I can't say much else without giving stuff away, just please seek this out wherever you can. The thing that sucks about a lot of the movies that I see at the Chicago Critics Film Festival is that (with a few exceptions) most of these films just get dumped on VOD if they get a release at all. I know it has a NY/LA release now, but I'm praying that it gets into a few Chicago area theatres and then a likely Netflix release (since I know that Penny Lane's Our Nixon is on there). But I can safely that this is easily in the top 5 documentaries that I've ever seen. It's a beautiful, gut-punching, hilarious, and bizarrely horrifying documentary with an important and I-can't-believe-I've-never-heard-of-this true story and it needs to be seen by everyone.

(For my C.P. friends, just pretend these are popcorn kernels). ;)