Review- The Bridge

My roommate loves documentaries.  My roommate before him loves documentaries.  I like documentaries.  So when one of them brought home The Bridge, I was a bit skeptical.  I have never really been one for extremely dark movies.  Movies like A Serbian Film, Irreversible, and Antichrist bother me.  So when I read the description for the bridge I was more than a little concerned that I'd be permanently scarred by its content.  The premise is simple- about 25 people kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge every year.  A camera crew set up spots all around the bridge for an entire year in hopes to capture some of the victims.  The result is The Bridge.  Not only did the filmmakers succeed in capturing almost all of the 24 suicides that year, they tracked down the friends, and loved ones of the victims and interviewed them.  While the film seems to be preoccupied with the morbid (namely people jumping off a bridge to their death), the group with which I watched the film seemed to take something entirely different from it.

The one similarity between almost all of the victims of The Bridge is that those who knew them best seemed dishearteningly indifferent toward their "friend"'s plight.  Some of the interviewees even claim that they saw the suicide coming.  Others seem unsurprised and talk very bluntly about the victim as though they had merely gone bungee jumping.  Very rare was the interview where the friend or family member seemed shocked, devastated, or even upset by the tragic death of the jumper.  This of course led us to ask: Why?  Why didn't the people who claimed to see this coming stop the person?  Why does nobody seem to care that their loved one is gone?  Why do the hundreds of on-lookers never (or rarely) interfere?  these questions are what will stick with you about the movie- not the deaths themselves.

This is dangerous territory for a filmmaker.  Tread too softly and the film loses its credibility.  Go overboard, and the film becomes exploitative.  Pleasingly, The Bridge finds a happy medium.  The film follows each jumper from the top of the bridge to the water.  But what it leaves out is the marvelous part.  There is little zooming, or examination of the victim after they fall to their wet demise.  The film makes sure the viewer can see the seriousness of the act, but doesn't dwell on the more gruesome aspects.  Therein lies the genius of this documentary.

There are other traits to The Bridge that make it a documentary well above the rest, such as the linear feel to the film.  Rather than presenting each jump as an isolated act, the movie follows one particular character from the beginning of his trip to the bridge, to his grizzly end in a beautiful ending shot, which I won't spoil here.  The Bridge is one of the better documentaries I have ever seen.  It's subject matter, while morbid, goes much deeper than Faces Of Death or many of the other shock docs out there.  Do yourself a favor and try it.  It may not be for everyone, but you'll quickly know if this is the kind of documentary for you.

Rating- 9/10