The Kids Grow Up (Saturday, October 30, 2010) (144)

The Kids Grow Up is an interesting documentary from Doug Block, and impressive just for its gigantic scope of time. Block presents a movie here that document's his relationship with his daughter Lucy from her birth through her going off to college. Block, a documentarian who has turned the camera on his own life and family before, always seems to have a camera running in his apartment.

Although the film shows lots of footage throughout Lucy's life, it primarily focuses on the last year that she is living at home, her senior year of high school. We see his ambivalence with her dating a French boy she met on a recent trip, we see how the two fight and she asks him to stop filming her, we see that when his wife begins to suffer from depression, he copes with the pain. Mostly, though, this is a film about the documentary format, a reflexive piece, a meta piece.

There is an unusual, unsettling aspect to the film that Doug is shooting almost everything we see, we hear his voice either through the camera's mic or through voice over, but we almost never see him on screen. He's both always there and never there. This is a very powerful examination of the "director as God" concept.

This is also about piece about the photographic form in general and how our memories of our lives are greatly shaped by photographs and videos we see of ourselves from before we have hard memories. I remember many events and places because I've looked at pictures of them over the years, but if you were to show me a new picture from the same place in time, I might not have any connection to it... because it would be new to me. Similarly, Doug's experience with his daughter is specifically tied to filming her (and I imagine her memories might some day be tied to footage like we see here).

This is a very intimate story - one that is normally a very internal family thing between a father and a daughter, but here it is done in public for all to see. This is also a bit unsettling, and reminds us of the violence of film making - that Lucy really doesn't have a choice but let her father film her, violating her privacy, whether she likes it or not (I'm sure Doug is a nice enough person that if she said "please don't make this movie and release it in theaters, he would listen"... but still, we see everything about Lucy and her family and that feels like a violation, no?).

There is something inherently dark about real people becoming the subjects of documentaries. Somewhere between their real lives and what we see on screen, they become characters who we can analyze and discuss, as if they were creatures of fiction.

But then there's also the issue that Doug films his daughter finishing high school and going to college, but never really experiences it himself. This is a sad thing, and one that Lucy comments on at one point. Clearly, this might be the only way he can deal with the situation, but it is still uncomfortable to see. At times we want to shout, "Doug - put the fucking camera down and hug your daughter."

In our digital age, I think it's interesting to ask whether all the pictures and footage we shoot every day to put on Facebook or Vimeo or Flicker really mean anything. Are we going to really go back and look at all of them? Are we just collecting experiences and would it be better to put the cameras down and really experience life? I don't know.

I am very interested in the questions this film raises for me. It is a movie about families and how they grow and change over time, but it is also a movie about movies. I think it gets slightly slow in the middle, but overall, it is very well done.

Stars: 3 of 4