Documentary Spotlight

Detropia (Doc of the Week #7)

Detropia

(Just caught another view of this film as it is the newest entry on PBS’ “Independent Lens” series. Check your local listings as they say and see a postscript I just added below with other Detroit-related items. Rick)

Detropia
Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady—2011—91 minutes (Docurama DVD)

The fastest growing city in the world circa 1930 is left with 100,000 abandoned houses or empty lots less than a century later. A pioneer of heavy industry and worker empowerment is relegated to being the poster child for a national trend that saw fifty thousand factories close in ten years, leaving behind a permanently insecure labor force. The home of Motown and a mighty civic infrastructure reduced to the outward appearance of a fallen civilization. Few places illustrate the diminished American Dream better than Detroit. The documentary filmmaking team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (who also made the excellent “Jesus Camp”) grapple with this weighty subject with a blend of citizen testimonials and impressionistic visuals, gleaning both the ground-level personal perspective and the dreamlike aura of an oversized ghost town.

Soon after the opening lament by video blogger Crystal Starr, as she gazes at the Motor City skyline from the upper story window of an abandoned apartment building, the film gets right down in the business. United Auto Workers official George McGregor regales the interviewer with stories of past glories while driving to a union hall meeting where most of the chairs remain stacked in the background of the shot. The nearly depleted rank-and-file membership listen in disbelief as McGregor reads out the latest proposal by American Axle, a company already threatening to move its production out of the country. Faced with either accepting a pay package that will leave them with slightly better than fast-food wages, or seeing the same jobs shipped overseas with impunity, it’s hard to leave the scene without understanding why the American middle class seems as gutted as the deserted buildings we see in so many of “Detropia’s” establishing shots.

Elsewhere, we see a nightclub owner trying to hang onto his business in the face of plant closures and fretting at an auto show when he sees the Chinese poised to corner the electric car market; briefly meet a performance-art couple attracted to the city’s low housing costs; and hang out with some enterprising metal scavengers, picking at the carcass of a once-great metropolis and selling the scrap to a country that can use it (China again). For Mayor Dave Bing, the options for improving conditions in this broke city are few. Left with half the town that once was, Bing (a former Detroit Pistons basketball star) proposes consolidating the thinly-spread population—down to 700,000 from a mid-century high of 1.8 million—into higher-density areas while “re-purposing” vacant land for large-scale urban farming. This idea is met with skepticism at a tumultuous community meeting and by a trio of amused front-porch philosophers. It’s these regular folks that make “Detropia” as appealing as it is, counteracting the directors’ tendency for a grab-bag approach that can cause contextual drift. So even amid the ghostly greens and reds of nocturnal street scenes, or snippets of barely-introduced subjects like the African-American opera singer, there will soon be some level-headed resident, with that Motor City mix of gallows humor and dogged perseverance, to keep things grounded.

In the end, several of the subjects sneak their way into the city’s gargantuan Michigan Central Station, the long-vacant Beaux Arts masterpiece that as much as any one edifice symbolizes this epic fall from grace. While the strategic bailout of the auto industry engineered by President Obama offers a modicum hope, the outlook remains bleak. The city went under state receivership in early 2013 and Dave Bing decided not to run for re-election. While there may be no foreseeable turnaround for the city’s endemic woes, to treat this as a matter apart from us is inadvisable in the extreme. “When you see your neighbor going down, you have to think about yourself,” the club owner warns us in the waning moments of “Detropia,” adding “a fire unchecked will only take you out as well.” It is another reminder of America’s abandonment of a production-based society in favor of an economy dependent on a distracted consumerism many can’t afford and lorded over by esurient Wall Street CEOs rewarded for cutting workforces. Ewing and Grady are to be commended for making their accessible and heartfelt film on this discouraging subject.

Det Disassembled

One thing I would have liked to seen a little more of in “Detropia” is the astonishing scale of both what was built there and the extent to which it has fallen to ruin. If you’re like me, then, check out the book “Detroit Disassembled”. I mean that literally. Check it out of the library if you can’t afford the hefty price tag, even if photographer Andrew Moore deserves every penny of it. This is one of the most extraordinary photo-essay coffee table books I’ve ever seen. Moore’s large-format camera peeks into every conceivable corner of what, through his lens, might as well be a lost ancient ruin. A melancholic paen to a faded nation of makers, the infrastructure and institutions that supported this industry-based system are now seen as losing a visceral battle to decay and the forces of nature. The dilapidation of catherdal-like assembly buildings, rococo theaters, technical schools, grand theaters and handsome apartment blocks may seem like an exaggerated and isolated example to some, but it leaves behind a sour taste nevertheless. It makes one think of the pipsqueak service economy we’re left with, 70% of which is dependent on consumer spending while at the same a huge percentage of workers are making the kind of wages that almost make indentured servitude an attractive alternative.

While I’m at it, I will also recommend the 4-minute film clip link below but don’t read the caption as it contains a spoiler alert, Documenatry Division.

Godfrey Reggio’s 2002 “Naqoyqasti”, the last of his trilogy that began with the trailblazing “Koyaanisqatsi” opens with that solemn tracking shot of the Michigan Central Station’s massive vaulted waiting room and once magisterial upper-floor offices, every window now smashed. Back on the ground, a close-up of the building’s mighty portico and entrance has a raging sea superimposed over it and the effect is of all of Western culture being pulled under.

Room 237 (Doc of the Week #6)

Room_237
Directed by Rodney Ascher–2012–102 minutes

There has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding “Room 237” and being a longtime Stanley Kubrick fan, I jumped at the chance to see this compilation of conspiracy theories that have grown up around his 1980 film, “The Shining”. Leaving my local art house a couple hours later, I felt sufficiently entertained (if a bit bewildered) and also a tad envious: where do these people get the time to come up with this stuff? According to the half-dozen interviewees here, Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King horror novel is really one or more of the following things.

A) The veiled confession of a man who feels remorse for helping fake the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
B) An encyclopedic film essay about sexual repression
C) A coded allegory of the Nazi holocaust
D) A connect-the-dots method of decrying the violent disenfranchisement of Native Americans

The director, Rodney Ascher, never shows onscreen the six conspiracy buffs that are heard expounding their obsessive ideas. This molecular-level investigation of details from “The Shining” runs the gamut from thought-provoking to barking mad. Yes, mainstream critics have kicked around aspects of theories “B” and “D” since the film’s original release. It didn’t take me long after pulling down my copy of “The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick” to find a section where author Norman Kagan quotes writers who spotted the Oedipal implications in the script. The tale of struggling author Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson of course), slowly going crazy over a long winter as caretaker of the snowbound Overlook Hotel, eventually menacing his wife (Shelley Duvall) and his physic young son played by Danny Lloyd, is well-known for its domestic abuse angle. The clues on offer here, though, can get a little outlandish. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a letter tray is just a letter tray. See it and decide for yourself.

The Native American supposition is also not far-fetched, as early on in the film the hotel’s manager reveals that the Overlook was likely built on a tribal burial ground and that the builders were engaged in a few skirmishes during its construction. Kagan details how writers like “History of Narrative Film” author David A. Cook see this “as a film metaphor for a society built on exploitation and even murder.” In “Room 237” one commentator can barely contain his excitement over the prevalence of stacked cans of Calumet Baking Powder (with its Indian logo) in the kitchen scenes. But a more convincing interpretation has to do with the film’s most iconic image. The stationary shot of double elevator doors, from behind which a torrent of blood is unleashed, is all the more powerful when the viewer is reminded that the elevator doors never open, that the genocidal truth will be uncovered even when access to evidence is closed out. It is also intriguing to think that the Jewish, Bronx-bred Kubrick, who never got past the pre-production stages of a planned Holocaust-themed film, may have inserted some below-radar clues that dovetailed with the other secret theme of Indian genocide. But details like the fact that Jack used a German-made typewriter are circumstantial at best.

By here in the land where astonishing revelations lurk behind every continuity error, by far the most eye-rolling of all the theories here is “A”. How did we not know that Kubrick, who set the standard for sci-fi visual magnificence in his 1968 epic “2001”, was somehow recruited by NASA to create on a soundstage what everyone thought they were watching on TV for real when the first men walked on the moon a year later? The old fake-moon-landing gambit has been around forever (remember “Capricorn One” starring O.J. Simpson?) and I doubt that Neil Armstrong would give featured conspirator Jay Weidner the satisfaction of rolling over in his grave. But this part of the film works as well (Ascher is on record as not endorsing his subjects’ opinions) because sometimes it’s just fun to let these people come in from the margins and air it out.

the-shining-still-3[1]

If you can’t tell that Kubrick faked the historic Apollo 11 mission from looking at this still from “The Shining” then you’re simply not trying hard enough.

Weidner is an admirer of Kubrick and in this legit documentary (as opposed to the self-produced ones he hawks on his website) he hedges his bets by stating that he’s not denying those astronauts landed on the moon, only that what we saw on the tube was not all that is seemed. But to use Where’s Waldo methodology to cast doubts on one of mankind’s greatest technological achievements is plain irritating. True, there are eleven cars in the front row of the Overlook Hotel parking lot, and the forbidden Room 217 of the Stephen King novel was changed to 237 for the film, signifying (of course) the approximate distance from Earth to moon in thousands of miles. But that may say more about OCD than it does about the possible secret motives of even a meticulous filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick. Still, some of this does leave you wondering:

shining%20boy[1]

So, yes, there’s a lot of intriguing stuff here and dedicated movie buffs all over will be tipping their caps to Mr. Ascher for this sensory feast. He adds in bits of all the other Kubrick films into the stew and at one point shows us the handiwork of an offbeat film club who project “The Shining” both forward and backward simultaneously, the resulting overlay offers a tantalizing glimpse of thin-air serendipity, comparable to the uncanny sync-up of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” with “The Wizard of Oz.” But Kubrick’s profile in the clouds during the film’s opening aerial shot? I’m just not seeing it. It is possible, as one “Room 237” interviewee suggests, that Kubrick’s 1975 Georgian-period drama “Barry Lyndon” shows a bored artist who came out of the experience with a determination to formulate a new secret language of film. (While we’re at it, let me put in another vote for the reclamation of “Lyndon”, which not only features some of the greatest cinematography ever but also stands tall as an indictment of the economic and class cruelties that dog us to this day).

But whether or not this assumed “secret language” was Kubrick’s intention is a mystery that he took to his grave in 1999. Since conspiracies are hard to prove and too interesting too ignore, they persist over time, whether it’s the “Paul is dead” hoax, the JFK assassination, devil-worshipping messages in heavy metal songs, etc. It lends us a sense of wonder, that there’s a clandestine layer of existence just underneath our everyday world. It’s a fun source of speculation and rumination, although be careful not to let your interest level get you to the point where people cross the street when they see you coming. It may be a bit too late for some of the interviewees of “Room 237.”

Escape Fire (Doc of the Week #5)

escape fire

Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
Directed by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke—2012—91 minutes

Using the true-story metaphor of a firefighter who kept his wits while his colleagues panicked in the face of a fast-moving wildfire, this film makes a compelling argument for a levelheaded approach to fix a profligate and profit-driven American healthcare industry. This is a system devised so that it “doesn’t want you to die and doesn’t want you to get well”, instead relegating hundreds of millions of people to an expensive habit of suppressing symptoms while doing little in the way of preventative care.

Director Matthew Heineman (founder of the Young Americans Project and producer of HBO’s The Alzheimer’s Project) and veteran documentarian Susan Froemke (who made the Oscar-nominated LaLee’s Kin and was associate producer of Grey Gardens) do an admirable job of approaching this thorny subject with common-sense clarity and quiet compassion while distinctly avoiding the blame game. Through sections like “Good People, Bad System” and “The Dark Matter of Medicine” we watch demoralized doctors and overwhelmed patients being churned through a $2.7 trillion industry, while credible claims are made that three-quarters of that amount is for the treatment of preventable conditions. The directors point out how technological developments in medical devices and wonder drugs have evolved into an end in themselves, instead of being used as needed. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” offers one expert. This mindset is said to be compounded by the fee-for-service system of doctor compensation, a setup that guarantees a quantity-first/quality-second result.

The end game, of course, has been a crippling inflation of health costs for the patient. One graphic shows what prices of everyday items would be today if they had moved at the same rate of inflation as healthcare since 1945: imagine paying $48 for a gallon of milk! The people interviewed by Heineman and Froemke (like former head of Medicare/Medicaid Don Berwick, nutritionist Andrew Weil and soul-searching PCP Erin Martin) suggest dealing with this issue with a sense of commonality and an enlightened wellness approach. A telling segment dealing with the evolution of a traumatized soldier back from Afghanistan, who frees himself from a multiple-prescription drug regime and finds help with holistic remedies, illustrates the imaginative problem-solving suggested by the title.

Instead, in lobbyist-infected Washington’s we get polarizing healthcare debate of recent years—as depressing as it is predictable—where American’s sense of rugged individualism gets exploited and boiled down into shortsighted self-regard. Even with the passage of Affordable Care Act there is still a long way to go with this issue, not the least of which is the way that the very word “care” (as in “Obamacare”) has been reduced to a derogatory term. Escape Fire is an excellent place to start to get one’s bearing on a crucial societal dilemma that affects us all and needs to be put right in all haste.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Doc of the Week #4)

Tammy faye

(In view of the Supreme Court’s recent hearings on gay marriage cases, and the recent conversion of several Republican lawmakers in favor of same, I figured it was as good a time as any to re-print my review of one of the earlier unlikely “evolvers” on this issue).

The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato—2000—80 minutes

Long seen as a figure of ridicule by those who recall her messy mascara meltdowns during her husband Jim Bakker’s infamous trial, televangelism’s first lady comes across surprisingly well in this entertaining revisionist biopic. Tammy Faye Bakker seems every bit the likable, plain-dealing farm girl who was an equal partner with preacher Jim. The couple built up a three-network TV empire based on a showbiz brand of Christianity that was kinder and gentler than that of most of their counterparts (Tammy is seen embracing AIDS patients way back in the early Eighties). But the Bakkers would be done in by personal scandals (remember Jessica Hahn?) and a penchant for living too high on the hog while their gigantic, parishioner-subsidized Heritage USA theme park was tanking.

The directors have a sharp eye for the snarky appeal of this subject matter, but in the end they ease up on eyeliner discussions and zero in on the dogged perseverance of an open-hearted woman who apparently received a lot more negative publicity than she ever deserved. “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” became a huge hit among homosexual men, and towards the end of her life she declared herself to be in favor of same-sex marriage and made many appearances at Gay Pride events. It’s ironic, given her fundamentalist background, that Tammy became a gay documentary icon almost in a league with Little Edie from David and Albert Maysles’ “Grey Gardens.”

Cropsey (Doc of the Week #3)

220px-Cropsey

Cropsey
Joshua Zeman & Barbara Brancaccio–2011–84 minutes

Both Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio grew up on Staten Island in the 1970s when the Cropsey urban legend was well known. Cropsey was an all-purpose name given to alleged violent maniacs and was used by children wanting to put a scare into each other or by adults wanting to keep their kids out of the woods. The Cropsey fable was a familiar one up and down the Hudson River Valley but had special resonance around the central greenbelt of New York City’s outer-island borough, with its dense woods and disreputable state-run institutions.

In 1987, with the disappearance of a developmentally-disabled girl near the greenbelt, and further reports of other missing children, these flashlight-under-the-chin stories took on a genuinely scary aspect. Zeman and Brancaccio, both now filmmakers, return to their old haunts, so to speak, to investigate the chilling case of local drifter/creep Andre Rand. Rand was convicted for the girl’s abduction but not for her murder, even though her body was found in the woods near his makeshift encampment. They interview family members, search volunteers and law enforcement officials, most of who are convinced that Rand is responsible for the disappearance of the other missing children. An attempt is made to interview the prisoner himself, but after a series of increasingly bizarre letters sent from his Riker’s Island cell, the obtuse Rand elects to keep his own counsel.

Is Andre Rand the real Cropsey? The greater canvas on which this tragedy is painted is the greenbelt area itself. It had been home to a tuberculosis ward, a poor farm and the Willowbrook State School, a notorious institution that once housed, in the most appalling conditions imaginable, New York’s most severely mentally disabled children (Rand had once been employed there as an orderly). The ghostly abandoned hulk of the school, and the extensive tunnel system underneath it, still seem to echo with awful institutional memories. It is a perfect location for some real life scares as Zeman and Brancaccio decide it would be a great idea to grab their camera and tour the buildings at night alone.

“Cropsey” succeeds so well because it can work on different levels—as a crime story, a look at the bad karma that rebounds from societal abuses and for it’s built-in appeal for the urban explorer crowd or just those with fond memories of “The Blair Witch Project.” Underlying the whole film is a sense of the power of place in our lives, and the enigmatic hold it can have on people is shown on the faces of uneasy residents who find it hard to discern “the facts from the folklore.” Even in our self-absorbed electronic age, these feelings emanating out from the natural world still hold sway, as they have done since time immemorial. It is interesting to note the misgivings of a Native American tribe that inhabited Staten Island long before Dutch settlers arrived. They named it Aquehonga Monocknong—“the place of the bad woods.”

The Art of the Steal (Doc of the Week #2)

“As through this world I wander, I see lots of funny men,” Woody Guthrie sang back in 1939, “Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.” Although Guthrie wrote those lines for the song “Pretty Boy Floyd” their relevance echoes far beyond the world of bank robbers and foreclosure-happy branch managers during the Great Depression. An interesting modern manifestation of his bon mot is in the field of art thievery. Here in the Boston area, there’s been much in the news lately about the FBI being close to solving the infamous 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This is a case where old-school bad guys gained entrance by posing as cops, tied up the guards in the basement and made off with a half a billion dollars worth of Rembrandts, Vermeers and Manets. But now there seems to be a more genteel way of relieving museums of their collections and the public of their cultural heritage. The newly-expanded Gardner Museum, like the Barnes Foundation depicted in the film below, was the quirky end product of a maverick art collector, places that (despite the last will and testament of their founders) can be tampered with in an age where top cultural institutions are beginning to look as monolithic as the too-big-to-fail banks.

art of the steal

The Art of the Steal
(Directed by Don Argott—2009—101 minutes)

In “The Art of the Steal”, the corporatization of culture is seen as an invasive, extra-legal force trampling the legacy of the eccentric and combative inventor/art collector Albert C. Barnes, whose extraordinary inventory of early modern paintings were displayed at his semi-private foundation in a Philadelphia suburb. Argott meticulously traces the battle that began after Barnes’ death in 1951 between his foundation and the cultural/political establishment over ultimate control of a collection that came to be valued at around $25 billion. Barnes was born to working-class parents, worked his way through college, and made a fortune inventing an anti-syphilis drug in the days before antibiotics. He was a passionate and prescient art lover and in the depths of the Depression bought up hundreds of canvasses by the likes Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Renoir and Van Gogh. These works were ridiculed by Philadelphia’s cultural elite as “primitive” and “debased”, cementing Barnes’ disdain for high-society and causing him to decamp to nearby Merion (a mere five miles away from the detested Philadelphia Museum of Art) where he hung the works in quirky galleries and ran an egalitarian art school.

Argott deftly works this story along two parallel tracks: first as a parlor mystery that traces the subtle chipping away at Barnes’ will (which stated in no uncertain terms that the paintings were never to leave the Merion location) by elements both inside and outside of his foundation; and secondly to the greater question of what is the correct dispensation of world culture in an era when individual works of art can easily sell for tens or even hundreds of millions. As the controversy came to a head in the first decade of the 21st century, Argott was there as the institutional powers that be (the successors of those who once belittled Barnes’ tastes) slowly asserted themselves in the idea that the collection was now too great to be left so inaccessible—-and while an opposing protest movement started calling it the greatest art theft since World War II. This elegantly paced and visually striking documentary seems to be a staunch defense of the Barnes Foundation as a “handmade thing in a machine world”, a populist outpost against the relentless commodification of modern life. Others have perceived “The Art of the Steal” as being one-sided (probably a lot of the same people that Argott lists as declining to be interviewed) as the articulate group of talking heads seem to concur more with Barnes’ rebellious worldview, as impractical as it is, than with those who he saw as putting themselves on a “pedestal… to pose as patrons of the arts.” Argott is in effect holding accountable those who are going to get their way in the end anyhow, as good a reason as any for a non-fiction film. It certainly has struck a nerve as Q&A sessions after film festival showings have repeatedly turned into shouting matches, pointing out the strong emotions behind a contentious issue that Argott has brought so memorably to light.

(Those interested in this subject should look into the case of the Seward House Historic Museum in upstate New York. The painting “Portage Falls on the Genesee”, by Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, hung in the house for over 100 years before being summarily removed by museum’s overseer foundation. The canvas, recently appraised for a cool $18 million, was removed under police escort after the foundation’s unilateral decision that it was too valuable to hang in just any old historic home and needed to be sold off to a private collector at auction instead. The shocked museum operators may find only cold comfort in the promise that they will share in the proceeds.)

Lucky (Doc of the Week #1)

To go along with the (hopefully) imminent release of my indie book “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film”, here’s my new weekly post that will spotlight a work of particular interest. This feature will mostly be titles that have come out in recent months since the book’s completion, along with some obscurities that deserve wider recognition or older non-fiction films that are being re-released. Documentary film is one of the most vital of all art forms and has arrived at a sort of golden age in the last couple of decades, with quality and variety of subject matter increasing exponentially, along with viewer interest. So there’s a lot to choose from. A doc a week? Well, with a mid-summer hiatus and maybe a break for the Christmas holidays, I think I can pull it off. Please check in on the weekend for the latest. Cheers, Rick Ouellette

lucky
Lucky
(Directed by Jeffrey Blitz—2010—82 minutes—Docurama Films)

Ever enter a contest and have someone hit you with the old line, “nobody ever wins those things”? The same could be said to those buying tickets for one of the high-stakes lottery games that have become hugely popular in the U.S. in recent decades. Except, of course, we know that people win them all the time—you see them on TV holding up an oversized check for some astronomical sum (often in the tens of millions) then rarely hear about them again. The odds of knowing someone who has hit the Powerball jackpot must be about the same as actually buying a winning ticket yourself—about one in 180 million. So it’s up to documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz, who also directed 2002’s crowd-pleasing Spellbound, to make this fascinating case study of several winners and look at the first year results once the mega-bucks start rolling in. It’s all here, the good, the bad and the ugly and rest assured there is a bit of all three.

Blitz approaches this rather delicate subject with careful steps. Each of his subjects is first introduced with a five-minute segment. We get a feel for their personal backgrounds and the initial euphoria of their sudden fortune, making it more resonant when Blitz circles back and their stories deepen. First up is Quang, a Vietnamese immigrant working in a ConAgra meatpacking plant when he won $22 million as his share of a prize with several others in a company pool. This is a man who had been severely injured fighting alongside Americans in the war and barely escaped with his wife and his life after the Communist victory, luckily getting picked up by a French rescue craft instead of a Soviet warship. These kinds of hard experiences lead to the type of philosophical outlook and rational decision-making that bodes well, where sudden good fortune is seen as an opportunity to build on and not a magical escape hatch from drudgery.

Those less well-centered have more difficulty with their “good fortune.” James was a middle-aged bachelor who had lived with his parents. His employment situation and living condition nose-dived after their deaths and he was down to his last three dollars when he plunked it down on a ticket that replenished his supply to the tune of $5.5 million. But he still seems adrift, buying a needlessly huge house to keep his money away from perceived exploiters and missing the several dozen cats that used to live with him. Buddy, hailed by the local media a year before for saving a baby from a burning building, is said to have been rewarded by a $16 million gift from above. After his bad-news brother from hell re-enters his life, Buddy wonders if the devil didn’t have a hand in it as well.

The conundrum facing mathematician Robert is more subtle but no less important. He’s told by his university employer to “wrap up your work and we’ll find somebody else” almost immediately after breaking the news of his lottery win. The reaction is telling in a country that instinctively worships wealth, while the idea of one’s work being equal to one’s worth is slower to gain traction. The huge disconnect between “something you do” and “something you won” is something he never counted on while buying tickets on a lark. Most relatable of all may be the experience of Kristine and Steve, a solid middle-stream suburban couple with two teenage kids, who win a mind-boggling $110 million. “You work your whole life to be part of the crowd,” they tell Blitz. Becoming estranged to longtime friends who can’t help but be resentful is jarring—-telling your kids that they’ll have to have a pre-nup when they get married is just as disconcerting. No longer on the same wavelength as those still living from paycheck to paycheck (one even tells them she can no longer stand the sight of them) they decamp to an affluent Florida community, enjoying the lifestyle, doing charity work, managing their treasure and suspecting all the while they may never totally fit in there either (“we are our own species”).

Blitz presents all this in an attractive package, familiar though it may be in its modish, non-narrated way. The subjects are comfortable and candid at the hands of an unobtrusive director, who fills in the history-of-the-lottery backstory during appealing animated interludes. These subjects can end up being misguided—-throwing away in a few short years more money than the average person would make in a lifetime—-or canny enough to use the winnings as seed money to build businesses for future family generations to run, avoiding the brain-deadening results of trust fund indulgence (the Kardashian Effect, if you will). They are all treated with equal deference by Blitz and that’s as it should be. One informational sequence early on lets viewers know that lotteries have been around in America since Colonial times but were banned for several decades due to administrative corruption. When it started again in 1964, the top prize was $100,000. After watching Lucky, it’s not hard to feel it would have been just as well if it stayed at that but, say, adjusted for inflation to about $750,00 in today’s dollars. Three-quarters of a million will take the edge off most anyone’s financial pressures without catapulting winners into the warp-speed unrealities depicted here. But in today’s empathy-deficient global economy, where genuine economic security seems to be the domain only of top corporations and those already wealthy, everyday stresses and wishful thinking will lead people to the local convenience store time and again in hopes of riches beyond their wildest dreams—-even if most never realize just how much that will entail.