Review: ‘Life in a Day’
One of the biggest complaints about YouTube is that, rather than allowing filmmaking to become more democratic and giving everyone the opportunity to produce his or her work of art for virtually nothing, it's only given birth to 10,000 cute videos of kittens and babies. In other words, we haven't really used the site to explore our creative muse; we're just becoming more self-absorbed as we emphasize the trivial. So there wasn't much reason to get excited about "Life in a Day," a documentary produced by YouTube that compiles hundreds of hours of footage shot over the course of one day by amateurs around the globe. Turns out it's actually quite thoughtful in its own modest way. And there isn't one adorable kitten on display.
The premise is simple: Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald ("One Day in September," "Touching the Void") invited people to shoot moments from their life from July 24, 2010 and submit them. Then, Macdonald and editor Joe Walker pieced the footage together from about 4,500 hours into a 90-minute movie. Going from early morning to midnight, "Life in a Day" doesn't offer much in the way of narrative -- there are a couple small random vignettes -- so as to instead get at the idea of what it means to be alive at this exact moment in time.
Much to Macdonald's credit, "Life in a Day" is rarely the precious, we-are-the-world humanist parable it very easily could have been. In addition, unlike the recent documentary "Babies," "Life in a Day" doesn't play on liberal guilt by glorifying footage from poorer parts of the world at the expense of the richer areas. There's a real fairness to Macdonald's choices, a refreshing refusal to use the footage as a way to make obvious points about the human condition. He seems to be asking us not to judge what we see but simply accept it as one glimpse of what goes on in the world.
Consequently, "Life in a Day" is more about its overall experience than its individual snippets. Macdonald doesn't include information about where we are at any one moment or provide context about the lives we're watching. So the person we meet who had cancer or the person who goes skydiving are just people -- no more, no less. But while Macdonald did give his filmmakers a few questions to answer if they so chose -- What's in your pockets right now? What are you afraid of? What do you love? -- "Life in a Day" is shockingly not me-me-me. Whether intentional or not, Macdonald has emphasized the universal in his subjects, which means the movie doesn't feel like the work of a whole group of show-offs trying to promote their own work. This isn't to say that there isn't some remarkably shot footage in "Life in a Day," but it's always at the service of the larger "story" of creating a time capsule. But unlike most time capsules, this one doesn't include a lot of cutting-edge gadgets or innovations. It's more about capturing a sense of people's mindset in 2010, although even then the documentary isn't really interested in shooting for the zeitgeist. This may have been shot last year but, really, much of what's discussed could have happened at any time.
And while certain moments and sequences are more engaging than others, "Life in a Day" is a surprisingly emotional experience. When the project was first announced, it sounded like a big gimmick -- Hey, let's all make a movie! -- but the genuineness of the experiment comes through. The fleeting images of love and death and quiet contentments and big worries are minor on their own, but collectively they resonate. Without pushing too hard, Macdonald actually convinces you that we live in a pretty wonderful (and complex) world.
Grade: B
