Last year, Ridley Scott and director Kevin MacDonald devised a hell of an experiment: they put out a worldwide open call for YouTube users to make a clip documenting their lives on July 24, 2010, with the intent of editing all the submissions together to create what would basically be a comprehensive (if not quite definitive) documentary on life in the 21st century.
The submissions have been tallied and assembled like Voltron by way of a Benetton ad, and what we have now is Life In a Day, a fascinating if distant hodgepodge of random folks' musings from all across the world, strung together into a 90-minute feature. It's an interesting conceit, and there's definitely something to be said that Life In a Day is pretty much the first social-media movie ever made (next up: a Twitter film with a script 140 characters or less. Well, not really, but wouldn't that be nuts?). But Life In a Day, fitfully interesting as it is, feels more like an extended, sometimes assaultive advertisement for YouTube than a proper documentary.
Let me clarify that. This isn't a bad movie. There are fits and spurts where it is, actually, quite beautiful (the segment on birth), funny (an old English couple renewing their vows) and moving (an astonishing, fly-on-the-wall scene of a young man coming out to his family). But documentaries have a point. They have a narrative, they have a conflict, and they have a goal at the end. This one is so scattershot, lingering on its images for so few seconds at a time (Transformers 3 holds its shots longer than this bad boy) that it's incredibly hard to figure out what we're supposed to be focusing on, or what the movie is really even trying to say.
MacDonald, who doesn't so much direct this movie as stitch it together, doesn't seem to know, either. He does keep going back to one guy, a Korean man who's traveling the world on his bike, as kind of a human checkpoint for the day's progress, but for the most part he relies on the swirling, scattershot half-stories that surround him. Happily, these images hold you in check, but few of them are designed to hold one's interest beyond, say, the few seconds it takes to watch a YouTube clip (ironically enough, some of the more intimate stories -- a father and son going for a cheeseburger; a Chicago kid asking out his crush -- could be a decent foundation for an actual short movie).
And make no mistake, some of this stuff should have been left on YouTube. At its best, Life in a Day at least sniffs the kind of human connection it's trying to wrestle out of three-minute snippets. Perhaps its saddest and most powerful scene shows an Army wife getting all dressed up for a Skype date with her husband. At its worst, it veers closer into exploitation -- a cow is slaughtered on camera in one scene -- and even voyeurism (a subway passenger films a young woman the next car over, and hastily shoves his camera away when he's made). For every scene that grips you, there comes a bunch of moody, artsy interludes (people living in the jungle?!?! WE MUST HAVE IT!!!!) that start promisingly but never go anywhere.
MacDonald finally arrives at a point in the final, haunting clip, which can be surmised as: something extraordinary is constantly happening, just probably not to you (Thanks, dude!). But it's enlightenment with a cost, by then you're more dazed by what you've just seen than anything else. Frankly, if you checked out when the cow got killed, nobody could really blame you.
