As Slow As Possible

The trouble with seeing great films, as I did today (more about this later), is that it makes the defects of the merely average ones stand out even more. I snuck out of Must Read After My Death and ran across the street to catch As Slow As Possible, drama director Scott Smith’s first documentary.

There had been a lot of buzz around this film, and I loved its central metaphor: Ryan Knighton is slowly going blind from retinitis pigmentosa, an illness with an unpredictable course. Now, 15 years after his diagnosis, with his sight nearly completely gone, he travels to Germany to witness a rare and momentous event in the performance of a John Cage piece called As Slow As Possible: the changing of a note.

Nice idea. What about the execution? Well, first off, Knighton is indeed a great film subject. He's articulate, thoughtful, funny and emotional. He's thought (and written) a lot about blindness and how he is dealing with it. And the journey - a blind man travelling alone to a small town in Europe, looking for a church where a specially built organ is supposed to take 639 years to play this John Cage composition - is ripe for all kinds of great documentary moments. So far so good.

But here I go again with another complaint about craft: the shooting is bad and the sound is worse - Smith is no cinematographer. After a nice set-up, the film follows Knighton around Europe like a kid brother shooting a travel video for mom and dad back home. There are some nice scenes because Ryan gets himself into interesting situations: he meets some people who don't believe he's blind; he has an odd conversation with a man in a bear suit. And the film is almost saved by a young boy who appears as if out of nowhere to lead Ryan to the church. The interaction between them is so lovely, it could be the basis for a dramatic short. But for the most part, while there are lots of good interview clips, the film's visuals don't do anything to support its ideas. The film never establishes a visual style (actually, that's not true - the style is "set camera on auto and follow the blind guy"), never uses pictures to set the mood or drive the story forward - it's as if the director didn't think through the look of the film at all.

I am a bit puzzled by all the rave reviews As Slow As Possible has gotten. I think the critics were reviewing Ryan Knighton and his ideas, not the film as a film.

I sense a theme emerging in my doc-a-day exercise: I have little patience with people who think that all it takes to shoot a documentary is picking up a camcorder and pressing record.