Minding the Gap
“Well, they call it child abuse now.”
Minding the Gap has been on my list ever since I got into the Criterion Collection. I’m the biggest documentary fan, especially ones that deal with young men and what it means to be a young man. Documentaries can overwhelm me at times on account that they can feel almost too personal. Minding the Gap is that and more, it’s a perfect documentary.
The storytelling aspect of this film is just insane, the smallest details mean so much when they’re attached to a real person and not a character a screenplay creates. For example, the board that Keire breaks early in the film. “This device cures heartache” written on it, shown close up after its end splits off. It’s symbolism wrapped in reality. Keire ended up being the person I was most psychologically interested in during the film, Zack isn’t uninteresting, but the things about Keire that made me so interested only really represent themselves in Zack fully towards the end of the film. Keire’s vulnerability matches Zack’s openness. My favorite part of the film is Keire’s trek in the cemetery to find his dad, because it gives birth to the most human moment in the film. There’s just a brief second where Keire tears up out of pure frustration and despair that he can’t find his dads tombstone, angry at himself for not remembering where it was. Once he finds it, it’s just so humanizing the way he shifts from happiness to reflection and potent remembrance. His “let’s just go”, kills me. To me, his acceptance of his deep love for his father that develops throughout the movie is better than any character development I’ve seen. Zack’s eventual self reflection, or at least verbalized self reflection, ends up being the combination of everything he is throughout the film. I need some more time to sit on what Zack is as a man, because I hurt for him on a human level but I don’t always agree with his viewpoints, but maybe some of that is the product of his environment he probably is. I think Bing’s story can get lost amongst the job he does with sharing Zack and Keire’s, and I half wonder if that’s what he wants. There’s just enough mention of it and description of it to make sense of why Minding the Gap exists, but just that much. This rivals Hoop Dreams, my favorite documentary and one of my favorite movies of all time, in many ways for me. I think I could be 50/50 on some days about which one I like more.
It’s funny, the movie is very direct about skateboardings importance and involvement in the lives of these young men, and yet you could get away with saying Minding the Gap is not the slightest bit about skateboarding. Not only is it not about it, you could argue its only purpose is to link the human beings in the movie with some sort of common ground, much like basketball in Hoop Dreams. It’s really the perfect movie, the perfect documentary, the perfect documentary of the modern day experience of so many young men in this country.
Also, Zack finally gets the ladder he needs at the end of the movie. I hope that guy got off the roof.