This "documentary" should have been a 20 minute oral podcast. It's embedded in a too-frequent cliched narrative that presents a clean, safe, middle-of-the ground kind of predictable suburban documentary that makes an audience feel good due to trite resolutions. It appeals to digestible consumers and critics' familiar tastes while also name-dropping celebrities in the indie world to garner attention and interest from an audience while forcing their integration into a meaningless and pointless story that has nothing to do with those people.
The documentary has no momentum; it's absent of meandering surprises; it is vacuous; and it falls short of entering into daring journeys with unknown outcomes. The documentary feels like a desperate attempt to "say something" or "accomplish something" as a last breath to prove and validate one's significance. That's not such a bad thing, however the movie doesn't follow through in this direction which would have been a much more fascinating, brave and honest story.
The majority of this documentary is either talking or speaking with no action. It jumps from one character to the next without any connection whatsoever - other than hollow, sad, sentimental stories about finding oneself in a world that's out of sync with one's own personal desires and wanting to be "recognized" and "seen" in life (e.g., validated) before we all disappear. In this vein, the documentary verges on creating a visual self-help guide with an unconsciously motivated guru-therapist-director finding salvation and peace (for who? The audience? Himself?) by discovering "what's important" to him in life. In other words, the documentary is chockfull of rambling platitudes, psychological rationalizations, and inventive justifications to neutralize any sort of regret or guilt that might be lingering in the deep corners or minimal surfaces due to one's perceived decisions or social or cultural position in a partially fulfilled life.
A more interesting documentary would have been to explore all those shattered and broken pieces of reality as fragments of a greater artistic piece that the director is trying to assemble and make sense of as he reaches his so-called mid-life crises. In a way, he accomplishes this beautiful artistry ... but only in a few minutes towards the end as described below.
With these critiques in mind, I must admit the last twenty minutes (with the exception of the final ten minutes of the movie) are some of the best and most insightful conclusions and resolutions I've seen in documentaries over the last twenty years. However, the David Milch material is unnecessary and should not have been included at the end of the documentary as it contorts the narrative back to the self-help, garbling and trite gibberish that fills the majority of the movie (while also introducing another celebrity for the sake of the all-too-frequent celebrity docs that are suffocating contemporary documentary).
The final sentences of the movie pair well with the best twenty minutes towards the end. Overall, good effort but ultimately a failed attempt at meaningful coherence as not enough attention is given to the director's personal narrative over his life course. The movie misses the target.
