Review of Life in a Day (2011) by Kenneth L — 12 May 2013

This movie, which is the final product of an unrepeatable experiment, really is an incredible piece of work in many ways. The idea of the film was to capture a taste of human life all over the planet on a given day, which happened to be July 24, 2010. To do this, thousands of people from all over the world were given video cameras and asked to record their lives that day, and to answer some simple questions. Apparently over 4,500 hours of video were submitted, and the best of it was edited down by Joe Walker and director Kevin Macdonald in a Herculean feat of selection.

The movie has no voiceover narration and nothing to explicitly link all the footage together. Coherence in the immediate sense is accomplished through associational editing and music which psychologically links everything together. The movie does broadly follow the patterns of the day - people wake up, have breakfast, go through their daily routines (or not), and eventually night falls. We see many, many stories, some of which are more fully-developed than others. Some of the most memorable ones, for me anyway, include a Japanese man and his young son remembering the boy's absent (probably dead) mother; the American family dealing with the stress of the mother's having cancer; the Russian parkour guy; the boy shining shoes somewhere near the southern end of South America; the young gay guy in New York coming out to his grandmother over the phone; and the Australian man recovering from heart surgery. In each of these cases, and in many others throughout the film, I actually wished I could see more of their stories.

The film is frequently visually stunning. It's amazing that it was apparently shot entirely by nonprofessionals, since so much of it looks as good as anything you see in a professional movie. Not that it all looks great of course - much of it is humble, grainy, poorly lit, obviously handheld, and so on. But there are still incredible shots here. There's one skydiving shot that's as great as any shot I've ever seen. At times, the movie almost feels like the best thing Terrence Malick never made. The music, by Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert, does a lot of heavy lifting to bring everything together, and is quite beautiful in its own right. There's a song by Ellie Goulding that really works in context.

This movie frequently tries to evoke Jung's "oceanic feeling," and damned if it isn't successful in that effort. The message that humans everywhere are more similar than dissimilar is perhaps a familiar, sentimental, some might even say banal one, but few works of art have ever conveyed that message more directly or with more evidence to actually believe it. The movie is an hour and a half selected from 4,500 hours; but if the movie had been 4 hours long while maintaining this same level of quality, I would have been happy with it.