Review: The Bridge

Suicides off of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge are so common that one was reported by the crew of X-Men: The Last Stand while filming a sequence there last year. A combination of easy access, opportunity for a dramatic exit and (in my opinion) a mistaken perception that a high jump into water isn't intrinsically fatal and leaves the door open for rescue, has turned the Golden Gate into the most popular self-murder destination in the world. In The Bridge, first time director Eric Steel sets up multiple cameras to capture footage of people pacing the bridge, climbing over the guard rails, and ultimately plunging the 200-feet to the shark-filled bay below. The jumpers, posthumously profiled through chilling interviews with friends and family, are a remarkably depressing lot, afflicted with hopeless schizophrenia, off-the-charts depression and other ailments that make their lives a waking nightmare. The Bridge is frankly excruciating to sit through. You may walk out of the film having absorbed its anti-suicide message, but you'll also want to kill yourself.

The jumper who gets the most screentime is Gene, a man with long, metal guitarist-hair who is described by his best friend as being "not of this world." He apparently spent every waking moment in front of his computer, until deciding one day to strike out on a journey to meet an 'online friend' whom he had struck up a relationship with. Believe it or not, that didn't pan out. Gene is also remembered as being an insufferable wolf-cryer, peppering even casual conversations with threats of suicide, which his acquaintances eventually began tuning out. An even more depressing case is Lisa, a young psychotic who tortured her parents by putting on a 'normal' act when they would have her institutionalized, so that she would be let out again. By the time she reaches adulthood, Lisa has lost all of her teeth due to neglect and is referred to as "poker face" because she never shows any emotion. One day she fixes herself a last meal at the halfway house, then walks to the bridge.

The camerawork is remarkably deft in capturing these one-take moments. In most cases, we see the jumper walking back and forth across a favored spot on the bridge and then just sort of hovering there while making that final, momentous decision. It's not hard to tell that they are in distress, and the film even captures one jumper being foiled in the act by a passerby who realizes that something is wrong. He pulls her all the way back over the railing, and sits on her until the police arrive. When they actually do jump, the camera follows them all the way down. It typically jerks up and out of frame for a moment and then re-acquires them just as they hit the water. While some people may look at that footage and wonder what separates it from Faces of Death, I can only say that I never felt like the movie was interested in playing up that angle. Documentary is supposed to be a camera switched-on and pointed at something interesting, and what's happening on that bridge certainly qualifies.

One of the profiled jumpers, Kevin, miraculously survived his fall. He landed more or less on his feet, shattering his lower lumbar region and sending bone fragments shooting up into his body like buckshot. Kevin seems to be an extreme bi-polar case prone to dramatic lash-out fits. He's interviewed in the film along with his father, who gives off the calm, defeated demeanor of a man who has accepted the shitty hand he's been dealt in life. If it was a parent that caused him such enormous heartache, he could move away. If it was a wife, he could divorce her. But he can't uncuff himself from a son who clearly causes nothing but mental anguish for everyone around him. You couldn't blame his father for secretly wishing that this misery hurricane had just blown out to sea, but he never betrays that sentiment. Some of the relatives and friends of the deceased jumpers do, though. They smile through their teeth and say things like "he's in a better place" and "his mind was a prison, and now he's free."

The Bridge will undoubtedly stir some viewers to action. They will try to make the bridge a more difficult 'emergency exit,' but the city fathers have already considered this and crunched the numbers, to no avail. A bigger barrier would be cost-prohibitive and difficult from an engineering standpoint. There's also a question of whether or not people should simply be allowed to jump. When director Steel set out to track down the surviving friends and family of the people captured taking the plunge in his camera, he may have expected to hear a dozen It's a Wonderful Life stories about hard-luck cases who could never catch a break and eventually decided to jump out of frustration and exhaustion with life. But the lot he ended up with have the kind of problems that make life an endless, pointless siege. Just to get from one day to the next requires a soul-draining commitment. The survivor, Kevin, even talks of how he "hurled" himself over the bridge, he was so eager to die. Would a higher guard-rail have stopped him?