Barbara Kopple, director of the riveting 1976 labor strike documentary, Harlan County U.S.A., misfires with her latest doc, Running From Crazy, a film that homes in on all the wrong things while the good stuff flies under the radar. Through the eyes of Mariel Hemmingway (Manhattan), we explore the troubled history of her family, wrought with suicide (her legendary grandfather, Ernest), mental illness (her eldest sister, Muffett), and destructive alcoholism (her fascinating sister, Margaux.) By a long shot, the film would have been more compelling if it delved more concertedly into the hereditary self-destructive nature of the Hemmingways, but instead, we watch endless footage of Mariel bouncing on a trampoline, talking about quinoa, granola, and kombucha, and climbing mountains with her douchebag boyfriend, Bobby.

Just like in Manhattan, where she played Woody Allen’s good-natured teenage love interest, Mariel is an open, kind soul. Her candor is startling at first, but her honesty and compassion make her quickly endearing. There’s something particularly pleasant and calming about her presence. She leads a healthy lifestyle with Bobby (a stuntman who exudes phony hippy machismo), eating organic foods and keeping in shape. She’s also a philanthropist, devoting much of her time to suicide prevention charities.

Above all else, Mariel seems like a fantastic mother, supporting her daughters Langley and Dree wholeheartedly in everything they do. The film opens with Mariel and Langley doing a photoshoot for Town & Country, and they seem to have a warm connection. Mariel is staunchly dedicated to distancing her daughters from their family’s sordid history. “This is not a family of tragedies. This is a family of complete and total embracive joy. That’s what I want to give my daughters.” The thing is, there are a lot of tragedies in the family (7 suicides total), and Mariel encapsulates the film’s primary weakness with her proclamation that she doesn’t want her daughters to think that, “because there’s mental illness in my family, I’m gonna go crazy.”

Mental illness can’t be equated to a label as dismissive as “crazy”, and dismissively is exactly how Kopple presents the stories of Ernest, Muffett, and Margaux. The literary legend is barely mentioned, and Muffett is oddly only very briefly shown near the film’s conclusion. Margaux, easily the most captivating figure in the film, is a ravishing beauty with a peculiarly raspy voice, is shown in archival footage of a documentary she herself made in the ’80s about her famous grandfather. These clips are the best in the film, as we learn from intimate, introspective interviews where her head was at and what drove her to take her own life in 1996. When Margaux admits to having wanted to drop Mariel when she was an infant out of jealousy, it’s thoroughly gripping.

These damaged people are the “crazy” Mariel is running from (she admits to only visiting Muffett, who has assisted living in Idaho, maybe once a year), and Kopple runs alongside her, focused on washing their hands of the family’s tragic history. The trouble is, to move forward you’ve got to learn from the past, and the dark roots of the Hemmingways feel neglected in Running From Crazy. When we yearn to get to the core of what haunted Margaux’s soul so deeply, Kopple instead shows us an extended scene of Mariel and Bobby arguing like petulant children as they drive to a mountain in the middle of nowhere, get a flat tire, finally climb to the top of the ham-fistedly symbolic peak, and have a banal exchange about the species of a bird they see in the distance. Kopple’s stubborn fixation with championing Mariel’s healthy-living lifestyle causes her to neglect the bounty of interesting material that lies beneath. She’s not running from crazy; she’s running around the truth.

Running from Crazy trailer:

Running From Crazy

The Hemingway family have always been “Running From Crazy” – their dark roots connected to Ernest’s suicide and their long history of mental illnesses caused depressive tendencies within every member of the family, even today. This unwaveringly honest account of the Hemingway family’s turmoil’s is delivered by actress Mariel Hemingway herself.

The documentary details every dark and beautiful aspect of the lives of the Hemingway granddaughters. Mariel, Margaux and Muffet each had their stories told and bought to life by Barbara Kopple’s direction, and the emphasis on suicide awareness and mental health evaluation were highlighted throughout.

The structure in which the documentary followed was slightly disjointed and hard to follow at times. It was sometimes hard to understand which sibling we were focusing on and what relevance that particular back story had on the topic but what defined this documentary was its ability to bring you closer and closer into the hearts of the Hemingway story. The last ten minutes were extremely touching and incredibly poignant to what Mariel wanted to achieve with this documentary; that nobody is perfect and it’s in the journey of life that we shape ourselves and understand who we are.

RATING: 7.7

Metro Manila

A touching story filled with depth, courage and sacrifice, Metro Manila tells the story of an out-of-luck family trying to survive the hardship they are being dealt. With no money and no food the family leave their province in the Philippines and travel to the metro Manila region to look for work.

As soon as they arrive in the city, their luck turns from bad to worse, until Oscar (Jake Macapagal) lands a job working with the armoured truck company delivering “boxes” to different clients – “one of the most dangerous jobs in the city”, explains Ong (the superior officer) during his preliminary interview. With no other option available to him or his family, Oscar takes the job and begins training with Ong. As the risk of robbery is high, the two drivers are always on alert and Ong constantly asks Oscar if he “has his back”, putting the audience also on edge.

The story also shows the suffering of Oscar’s wife Mai (Althea Vega) trying to provide for her family by working in a sleazy go—go bar. We’re able to see how much she cares for her children and how disturbed and unhappy she is by having to perform these duties whilst at work, giving us an understanding of the type of person she is.

Metro Manila was an incredible film about desperate times leading to desperate measures; with an extremely heartfelt ending you realise the severity of the struggle in which this family suffered. The production value was flawless in attention to detail with every bit of information displayed through extraordinary imagery and sincere performances by its cast- it will do well with ‘at-home’ distribution.

RATING: 8.2