Review of Finders Keepers (2015) by V H — 24 Oct 2015

We all have a story to tell, some more compelling than others. At the heart of "Finders Keepers" is a truly bizarre one about two regular guys from rural North Carolina: John Wood and Shannon Whisnant.

After a 2004 plane crash, Wood had his left leg amputated below the knee. For reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, he asked the hospital if he could keep it so someone dropped it off at his house wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. Wood had inexplicably expected to receive just the cleaned assembled bones, like a dinosaur display in a museum, so was startled to get something that looked like it had just been sawed off the bottom of someone's leg, which of course it had.

After a series of hilarious attempts at properly preserving the leg, a down-on-his-luck Wood left it inside a barbecue smoker in a storage facility and neglected to pay the rent. Enter Whisnant, a hillbilly wheeler-dealer who bought the contents of the storage unit at auction in 2007 and was shocked to get home and discover that his new smoker contained a badly shriveled human foot.

Whisnant initially did what any normal person would do; he called 911. But unlike the rest of us, he wanted to be allowed to keep the foot so he could turn it into a roadside tourist attraction. Because who wouldn't want to make a detour off the highway and shell out a few bucks to see a genuine petrified human foot displayed in its very own smoker?

Unfortunately, once Wood was identified as the foot's original owner, he wanted it back too, for whatever cockamamie reason he wanted it in the first place. Whisnant claimed it was rightfully his since he bought it fair and square and it was clearly covered by the time-honored childhood statute of "finders keepers". Wood claimed it was his because, well, it WAS his.

It wasn't long before the tabloids got wind of the story and the foot fight took on a life of its own, fueled by the fact that both Whisnant and Wood are very colorful characters. The story even went international, with both men being flown to Germany to appear on a talk show. And in a development that only seems fitting, the final determination of who got custody was decided in the TV courtroom of Judge Mathis.

As outlandish as this story is, it's a tad skimpy to be stretched into a feature length documentary, albeit a short one. There are a couple of things that make this work. First of all, both guys are funny, especially to an audience of snooty documentary-goers, aka city-dwellers. Whisnant, in particular, has a gift for hilarious malapropisms and off-the-wall statements, like his repeated assertion that when he initially picked up the foot it was "dripping cholesterol".

But none of this would have worked if it wasn't couched in a downright sympathetic portrayal of both men. The movie delves into Wood's addiction struggles, Whisnant's unhappy childhood, and both men's relationships with their fathers to paint a nuanced picture of the buffoonish characters depicted in the tabloids.

Though Wood is somewhat relatable from the start, the film's big accomplishment is the enormous amount of empathy I ended up feeling for Whisnant, whose larger-than-life redneck persona hides a surprisingly sensitive man.

We all have a story to tell. But sometimes it takes finding a shriveled foot in a barbecue smoker to coax it out.