Little Empty Boxes

Little-Empty-Boxes
Little Empty Boxes

I know this is kind of strong but I own up to it. The feeling has persisted and lingered right from when the credits of the new documentary titled Little Empty Boxes rolled to this moment as I write scathing pieces about a man who filmed his mother dying due to Parkinson’s and Lewy Body Dementia. Let’s get this straight, writing this might have been a relief for that person but it surely was not for me.

Little Empty Boxes is a film that made sense only before I began thinking about it. For example, early on in the film, Max Lugavere co-director by the way, Chris Newhard, the other co-director who does not feature in this film has had a conversation with his mother, Kathy, and she is sick. Then he thinks, maybe I will invite my publicist, who is made known only as Onelia (some people get last names, some don’t), to my home. Max tells Onelia that he is going somewhere and does not know when he is coming back as he has to look after his mother. Max lives in Los Angeles and Kathy is from New York City, so this is quite an, uprooting. He is a health food author, and podcaster but contrasts that with a harsh reality that he has to take care of Kathy. As a result, he says, I am going to move halfway across the US. Onelia, who has appeared only recently, speaks out. Max is at the height of his career and her headset says this consideration does not match the brand’s identity. It’s a brave position to take; he says, I don’t care. Instead, he states, I do not like the places where I have been auditioning anyway. He is moving to New York. It is the right decision to recommit in such a way.

He leaves the door open for his publicist and you hear Max tell her he will be freezing all their plans and does not know when he will be able to thaw them again. It suddenly comes to your mind that this scene could have been shot in two alternate ways.

In the first way, this film presents an actual depiction of events in real life, as Max has just informed Onelia on air that one of her clients does not plan to work for her in the near future. Much of the film was made in that annoying kind of reality TV which after the Catfish, seemed to have been fashionable. Where the director would film himself, and then record the person filming him and in turn another person would record the director. If this is about reality, then in its framework, there is a woman who gets fired in the presence of two cameras recording her startled expression.

On the flip side, this scenario could have been scripted. Then, my concern for Onelia would be out of line. If she fully understood what it entails, then it would be excessive to this extent in emotional blackmail. If so, then in that case, Max is depicting himself as making The Right Decision and that he is on tape as he decorates himself as a good man. Choosing to make his publicist appear impeding his unconditional love for his mother. It is like taking a selfie of one donating his money, therefore such an act of donation raises questions about the motives behind that action. And I would not have thought hard about it if the other parts of the film did not seem to gross me out. These things stack.

The first impression people get of Kathy Lugavere is none other than the fact that she collects art, and not just art from the known artists that sell it but pieces that are with ordinary people standing at the corner in the local flea markets. Her New York plush apartment is engaging and is packed with small sculptures and many framed pictures. It is a hand willing to have a long walk-through to listen to the owner concerning her eye-catching pieces of art. However, a tour is never offered to Kathy Lugavere and it is even more unfortunate that not much is said about her. It partly has to do with where she is and what has become of her illness in that particular scene she informs Max that she sees bugs in her bed aids sheagraphs who informs the camera that she has been naked and has undressed hurriedly and carelessly from the dresser. Barely aged 63, Kathy already feels that she is on the verge of dying. Which is why her son asks “So you feel like you’re giving up?” In her own words: “I feel like I’m going to be giving up soon enough”. Perhaps it was the directors’ intent to actually confine the showing of their movie with respect to who Kathy was at the time of the shoot.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to accept this definition of the directors’ aims when the film begins with a home video montage which reappears in the course of the film. The first seconds of the movie especially do not tell much about who Kathy was in her last years.

Kathy is in a difficult situation at the hospital. She is angry with her son for his unexplained reasons. She loves being out of her flat and looking at the city she loves. But the film appears to operate on a premise where she is already gone or as though she has never existed mentally. It is an incredibly painful absence of concern. Kathy is the one who has to go through most of the pain which was shown through the lens of a third person without knowing what Katty was able to do.

This emotion fully turns sour halfway through, when the plot expands. Looking at Kathy for the first time since the opening, Little Empty Boxes lets us watch Max discover the illness of dementia from a number of doctors. He has been asking for an unfair deal. What Kathy is doing now is not normal considering the fact that her mother was sharp at 96 years of age. It is difficult to fall apart because you are a normal women so why do you know decay so fast? The conclusion from that focus group is caused by diet.

It is often said that sugary cereal with milk is the custard of the mind. There is a rather tortured metaphor in which sugar and antibiotics are said to make it harder to play Alzheimer’s as though it were a tune on the piano. We learn that specific groups of people almost always develop Alzheimer’s after having surgeries, and we follow that up with a doctor explaining what the hippocampus is and pointing at a generic brain scan with X’s marked on it. The images assist us in locating the regions of the brain we may need to find later, in this case the hippocampus. Once we are made aware of the negative effects of sugar and refined cereals or flour for breakfast, we return to Kathy’s house where a box of Honey Bunches of Oats on her kitchen table is clicked like a meat hook in a Saw movie.

This interweaves with some collage-style humor animation which jars against the tone of the film in quite an odd sense, like as if we see Dwight Eisenhower suffer a heart attack for a few seconds out of nowhere and later on we are informed that the people in the 50s were afraid of heart disease and cancer as gallant cartoon characters die dramatically one after the other, as if these are not human beings and as if we were not introduced to a woman called Kathy who would be losing her memories in front of us. Gradually, one learns to accept the fact that the diet part of the film has over the course of the film completely overrun the film. Going back to Kathy was really knowing that Max was ready to put into practice what he had learned from these doctors to take care of her. About inflammation of the brain and then Kathy portrays a scene in which she pretends groans about having to drink kombucha, but of course, shortly thereafter we hear that plant-based diets deprive us of certain necessary fats, etc. That the brain needs. The focus of the film shifts towards diet and most of the feminists overwhelmed about emancipation ignore Kathy and go about constructing. When the brutality of his father Wardel modifies the behavior of Kathy’s sickness with the help of kimchi, Parkinsons and terminals inject the vicious texts.

One of the most compelling forms of film is the documentary especially the ones portraying real people as they interact with death. Two paces that come to mind are Sick and Dick Johnson is Dead. The essence of those films was quite different from that of Little Empty Boxes and dwelled upon the existence of people. Those people I was aware of. I knew where they lived and what life meant to them. I had an understanding of what they focused on. As the doctors of the film Little Empty Boxes see, the filmmakers wish for the audience to imagine Kathy as a generic fan of reality television struggling with familial issues across the globe. She is made less of an individual, as her son orders her to munch on nuts rather than chips. Cue the first rebuttal and let me recreate the premise for the film. “If only Kathy had eaten more fat and eggs and fermented foods.” I’m paraphrasing now of course, “she’d be doing better.” Perhaps! But this is not the film that was shown to me for forty minutes. That is quite unhelpful when trying to determine the type of person we are watching being profiled. It tells me nothing about Kathy’s life; it tells me how Kathy Lugavere feels in retrospect nothing at all.

I liked how Chris Newhard and Max Lugavere were willing to embrace the thought of shooting themselves while doctors were talking to them but I hoped they wouldn’t have wrapped it around this envelope. I never liked seeing Kathy getting worse and if possible, I loathed her being treated more and more as a living picture of what happens if your diet doesn’t change. I wanted more impressions about Kathy, more dignity, and more respect for the woman. I wanted this movie done by someone else. I wanted to slap the doctors who I have heard interviewed explain how people are to blame for their problems, how these smug morons explain it. I felt as if I was seeing someone promoting their supplements with a dead person’s memories. It was painful. It will be painful for a long time. This one breaks you in all the right places.

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