Review: One - The Movie

One April morning in 2002, a Michigan lawyer awoke from a sound sleep with an idea to make a movie about the meaning of life. He had no experience making films, but that didn't stop him. He recruited his best friend and his cousin - neither of whom had any filmmaking experience either - to help him, and soon after, armed with a digital camera and a set of questions, they set out to make their documentary. They intended to make a film about people from a variety of walks of life giving their thoughts on life, death, religion, happiness, and everything in between.

Instead, they ended up somehow - they don't really seem to know exactly how, but it all started with a series of emails they sent out - with a documentary featuring some of the greatest spiritual minds in the world today, discussing topics about which they write books and speak about to vast audiences. A little film that started as a whim, somehow evolved into a documentary about life, death, and God, discussed by spiritual leaders including Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hahn, Deepak Chopra, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, Father Thomas Keating, and Barbara Brodsky, a deaf woman channeling the spirit of a dead man named Aaron. One - The Movie has all the makings of a truly remarkable film - and it almost succeeds in being one.

The film opens with the filmmakers' first interview, with Robert Thurman - Robert Thurman! - reknowned writer and professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia, first Westerner ever to be ordained as a Buddhist monk, and close personal friend of the Dalai Lama (he's also father of actress Uma Thurman). As I watched the interview with Thurman, I found myself wishing he hadn't been the novice filmmakers' first interview; I really wish they had gotten the knack of interviewing down a bit more before tackling such a deep interview subject. Thurman is known for being a passionate and profound speaker, and yet somehow the film manages to make him come across here as a bit...boring. I got the impression watching Thurman that he wasn't terribly impressed by the filmmakers or the questions they were asking him, or heck, maybe he was having a bad day. At any rate, he seemed distracted and almost annoyed, two qualities I wouldn't expect to see in a Buddhist and former Tibetan Buddhist monk.

Other interviews were more vibrant, in particular the interviews with Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra, Father Thomas Keating, and a Buddhist nun, Sister Chang Kong, who positively radiated the compassion that Buddhism teaches. The one thing that comes across remarkably in the film is the similarity of the responses of all these people from different spiritual paths - how many of them talked about Oneness - the understanding that we all share a planet, and that no matter what cultural differences seem to divide us, we are all one with each other. From Father Thomas Keating, leading figure of the interdenominational movement to revitalize "centering prayer",  to Deepak Chopra, one of the leading practioners of  "mind-body" medicine; from Hasan Qazwini, religious director of the Islamic Center of America, to Taoist Mantak Chia; from spiritual icon Ram Dass to Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr.

All these great spiritual thinkers had very similar things to say about the state of our planet, the state of humanity, the meaning of life, and the concept of God, although they all represent different religions and spiritual paths. In between all these spirtual leaders were a range of ordinary folks, the most interesting of whom were a woman named Dragonfly, who spends her days wearing fairy wings and painting childrens' faces in a park in Woodstock, New York, and a homeless kid named Chris Willis in Colorado, who spoke to the filmmakers with remarkable honesty and wisdom. Interestingly, the two people who were most on the opposite side of the Oneness spectrum were a right-wing Christian radio host, who talked about bringing people to Jesus with guns and bullets, if necessary, and an angry atheist who talked nonchalantly about how the world would be better off with a billion or two less people, and how we should  "eliminate them for three generations". These two men, the fundamentalist Christian and the atheist, had much more in common than I'd expect either of them would care to admit.

And yet, in spite of all the moving teachings presented in One - The Movie - and in spite of the fact that I actually admire and respect many of the people interviewed - I still found the movie somewhat lacking. Here's the thing, I guess. If I had access to the kind of spiritual leaders these filmmakers had - some of the greatest, most profound thinkers in the spiritual community today - the last thing I would have done  is come to the interviews armed with a premade set of questions. I would have set the camera up unobtrusively, sat myself down next to my subject on a chair or meditation mat, and just...listened. Opened up with one question, maybe, and then just sat back and soaked in (and recorded) the great profundity these people are capable of. I wouldn't have asked a new question until they were all talked out of the first one; better yet, I'd have just let them keep talking and weaving threads and stayed out of the way of their train of thought, for as long as they were willing to let me sit and listen.

The other thing that didn't work well for me about the film was this "story", filmed in black and white, the filmmakers wove in and out of the interviews. The story was supposed to be about the spiritual quest of the filmmakers, I suppose (the chief actor in this bit was filmmaker Scott Carter), but it felt like to me as if someone had spliced in scenes from a really bad indie film trying to imitate a really bad French film. You know -- lots of shots of the morose actor sprawled on a bed in a dirty hotel room looking depressed, then the actor wandering the streets, touching homeless people, and I guess finding the meaning of life or something. At some point, he presumably became enlightened, because the bad indie film bits became colorized, and he rowed in a canoe to an island where he meditated with some guy in robes.

This was all very well and good and abstract, but frankly, I would have rather seen less of the artsy film school stuff and more about the filmmakers themselves and how they were actually impacted by meeting with all these great spiritual leaders. They trained for three days with Thich Nhat Hahn before interviewing him -- do you know how many people would give their eyeteeth for three days with that man? I want to know what they learned from that! What did he talk about? How did it change them? Are any of them now on spiritual paths they weren't before meeting these teachers?  How have their lives changed? This is a film about your Great Spirit Quest -- tell us about you!

This movie could have been a film about the spirit quest of these three filmmakers, about how they met and mingled with all these remarkable people, and how the course of their lives changed as a result. Or it could have been an interesting collage of a lot of peoples' ideas about life, death, religion, God, and mankind. Instead, the film feels at times like a documentary of  "Look at all these cool people we got to be in our film!" They even end the film with a collection of snapshots of themselves with some of the notables they filmed, which felt like "Hey, cool! Here we are with Deepak Chopra! And this is us with Robert Thurman..."

The filmmakers also could have taken the interesting approach of first filming a bunch of people who aren't in line with the concept of "Oneness" the film is about - like the Christian radio host and the atheist, and then showed that footage to some of these leaders and asked them to respond to the opposing view, rather than having them just answer a list of prepared questions. To be fair, the questions themselves weren't bad - things like "Describe God", "When is war justifiable" and "What is the meaning of life?" but the answers, at least as edited, feel very truncated and molded to fit the vision the filmmakers themselves wanted to present, rather than a collage of different voices.

In spite of its flaws, it is remarkable that these three filmmakers with no experience in film whatsoever managed to pull off this film and obtain interviews with all these notable and very busy people. Filmmaker Ward Powers notes, "In an increasingly divided world...the power of ONENESS is longing to emerge. It was this energy and inspiration that we knew would transcend any limitations or difficulties that we might encounter while trying to make this film." I just wish they had used their energy and access to delve a little deeper and to tell us more concretly the story of their own spiritual growth from the two year process of making the film.