The Bridge

I saw two movies over the weekend, A Mighty Heart and The Bridge, a 2006 documentary about suicide and San Francisco's Golden Gate. Both were interesting misfires, and they misfired in similar ways - by misunderstanding where the central drama of their story was located, and heading off in another direction instead. In the case of A Mighty Heart (of which I'll have more to say, probably, in the next National Review), this meant turning the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder into the attempted canonization of Angelina Jolie - sorry, Marianne Pearl. In the case of The Bridge, it meant chasing the stories of the people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, rather than the story of the bridge itself.

The director, Eric Steel, spent a year filming the bridge from afar, a feat of cinematic endurance that enabled him to film at least half-a-dozen suicides in the act of jumping. This astonishing, morbid footage is the spine of his documentary; the rest of it is taken up by interviews with the jumpers' nearest and dearest, and with one jumper who leaped at age eighteen and survived the fall, buoyed up to safety by a passing seal. Steel was inspired to embark on the project by an article on Golden Gate bridge-jumpers that Tad Friend wrote for the New Yorker, but his film misses what made that piece so interesting. Friend investigated both the Golden Gate Bridge's history as a suicide magnet and San Franciscans' odd relationship to this history, from the media frenzy over the five hundredth and thousandth suicides to the city's resolute (and popular) refusal to put up the kind of barrier that might prevent so many people from leaping to their deaths. Steel, by contrast, largely leaves this sort of context out and focuses on the suicides themselves, using the bridge as a gorgeous, inscrutable backdrop for a series of conversations about mental illness that are depressing without being particularly illuminating. All suicidal people may not be alike, but in The Bridge, at least, their families and friends' accounts tend to blur into one another, while the Golden Gate itself hovers untouched in the background, its dark allure a mystery that the film circles but isn't brave enough to approach.

Photo by Flickr user Marymactavish used under a Creative Commons license.