Here’s an especially tricky film to assess. To see it is to risk feeling as though you are intruding upon some wounding, deeply personal loss. To rate it risks invalidating the participants’ grief. The plain facts are these: this is an independently funded and released documentary by Jimmy Edmonds and Jane Harris, a British couple whose son Josh died, aged 22, in a car accident while touring Ho Chi Minh city in 2011. In the ensuing years, the pair have travelled America, reaching out to fellow parents who’ve ended up in the unnatural position of having to bury their children, and inviting them to speak about the unspeakable.
Responses from tearful defeat to unending rage are collected and assembled, offset by those rituals of remembrance that the subjects find consoling: Jimmy, touchingly, clings to his son’s vast photo archive. The interviewees, however, come from a limited spectrum. Though the film-makers make a brief stop-off to mourn the passing of a teenager who volunteered in poorer neighbourhoods, there is a glaring shortage of input from communities that have suffered disproportionately from burying their young; it would have meant venturing beyond the comfortably appointed suburban homes Edmonds and Harris gravitated towards.
The road movie framing lets some west coast sunshine in on these dark, depressing topics, but equally opens the film-makers to accusations of grief tourism: there’s often more scenery – the Grand Canyon, desert highways – than real clarity or insight. There’s one compelling encounter with the parents of a boy slain by his father’s gun, and we shouldn’t discount the project’s inbuilt cathartic value. Yet these 75 minutes keep raising questions the directors don’t have the time, distance or editorial rigour to answer satisfactorily. Can privilege help cushion death’s hammer blow? Does money make it easier to outrun grief? The film’s honesty goes only so far.
