https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80149821
An intriguing and finally rather sad film. The central character, Rachel, clearly has many issues from her life with which she is struggling but one of the most touching aspects of this was how the events and controversies surrounding her affect her children, particularly her oldest who, as he says ‘did not sign up for this’. As with the seemingly toxic/abusive relationship she had/has with her birth parents, this film once again made me remarkably grateful for the lack of trauma that I had in growing up. Their comments are very perceptive.
The film also gave an interesting insight into aspects of the debate about how/why/if people can and do ‘identify’ with certain groups and it would be interesting to further explore this, perhaps in relation to the debate on transgender people.What is the situation between certain set characteristics, physical or otherwise, and how someone identifies when characteristics of the group identified with are not matched by generally or universally accepted characteristics of that group, physical or otherwise?
I think too that it would have been interesting to hear about what Rachel actually achieved when chair (?) of the NAACP in Spokane before the whole ‘identity’ issue blew up. Even if she did lie/mislead people, is that to any degree offset by what she managed to achieve when controversially self-identifying?
However, I was not impressed by the rather rambling and muddled structure of the film; it seemed to be too much of a collage of interviews and film clips from a variety of times and places and we shot back and forth between them so that a clear narrative line was not really sustained. In one scene we seem to be exploring an interesting avenue but then in the next sequence we are on another aspects of the story - and only sometimes did we return to previous story threads. A pity and it did not justice the effective telling of the story. In fact I think the overall aim of the film was unclear; were we meant to be looking at her life now or what happened to lead us to where she is now. The film came across as not really knowing what it wanted to do or say.
Could have been better…