Tags: blog, film, documentary, 2024, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday May 07th, 2024
#MentalHealth
A fly on the wall documentary chronicling the run up to Ronnie trying to win his seventh World Title in 2022. But the documentary is not overly interested in his sporting achievements, instead it’s far more focused on Ronnie’s often public battles with his mental health. To which Ronnie quips:
all of a sudden it’s cool…I was twenty years ahead of the game, mate.
Ronnie is extraordinarily open and engaging about his problems and methods of coping with them. And the fact that he’s such an engaging and frank personality makes this film endlessly fascinating.
And yet for all that is open and honest about what is talked about, what’s not said left me with more questions than answers. Whilst some of Ronnie’s celebrity friends are free to talk about everything he’s been through, and his father’s prison sentence is discussed with great sensitivity, no mention is made of his past partners. And I didn’t know he had kids until they turned up in footage at the end of the film. His sister appears in family photos but is never even mentioned.
Ronnie talks at great length about his relationship between snooker and his mental health, but there are contradictions that never get questioned. He claims he would rather play well and lose than play badly and win. And yet he seems to hate losing and the documentary never digs in to that dichotomy.
None of this is a criticism, it’s admiral that there are certain areas of his life that he wants to keep private. And just letting him get everything off his chest, unguarded without needing to be defensive is incredibly revealing.
But it does mean that the closer I got to understanding what drives Ronnie O’Sullivan on, the further away I got from understanding him as a complete person. The more answers I got about how he copes with the pressures of his life, the more questions I had about why he did so.
Given Ronnie’s extraordinary life, career, talent and personality, it felt perfectly apt. One of the best sporting documentaries I’ve seen.
For further reading, I’d also recommend this fantastic article at Little White Lies Mental health and masculinity at the movies. There’s a few ‘spoilers’ (as much as you can spoil a documentary) but it's a far deeper discussion of the subject matter than I can manage.
Tags: blog, film, drama, documentary, 2024, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday April 08th, 2024
Ava DuVernay in magnificent form adapting a work of non-fiction.
Based on the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay has taken a highly imaginative and passion fuelled approach to its adaptation. Instead of a straight forward documentary we have a story built around Wilkerson’s process for writing the book. The books central arguments explained through conversations with people, both in her personal life and academics she meets through her research.
Then, peppered throughout this narrative, are dramatisations of events from some of the key research texts she uses to pull together her thesis.
The decision DuVernay is making here is to replace the logic and facts that books can densely pack in with the emotive force that films can provide. Scenes from America’s history of slavery are woven together with scene’s from Nazi Germany, and later India, that don’t so much argue that they’re from the same connective tissue but make you feel this truth.
We’ve all lost count of the number of dramatisations of Nazi Germany that we’ve seen on screen. But rarely do these scenes drip with so much disdain and disgust as they do in DuVernay’s work here. The brief scenes on a slave ship are nightmare fuel. If DuVernay ever decides to turn her hand to making horror movies we are all in trouble.
If I can nit-pick slightly, out of all the areas that the film deals with, India is the one I’m least familiar with and it’s also the area the film spends the least time with. I wanted to learn more. And I also wanted to learn more about why this system exists, who benefits from it and why it persists.
But then I suppose I can go and read the book for that.
Ultimately this is a profoundly moving, human and even hopeful film. Masterful stuff.