Earlier
this year I took a gander at documentary filmmaking brothers Jedd and Todd
Wider’s fleeting and mysterious God Knows
Where I Am about a fifty-something woman’s descent into madness and death. While critically acclaimed it for the Errol
Morris inspired dramatizations, the meandering ‘documentary’ otherwise left
yours truly largely indifferent and restless.
Not
long thereafter, however, the Wider brothers returned with To the Edge of the Sky, an instantly gripping, heart-wrenching tale
of a group of families fighting for their son’s lives who are dying from Duchenne
Muscular Dystrophy. Light at the end of
the tunnel for these children seems to be in the form of an experimental drug,
unfortunately administered however to a select few test subjects with the FDA
hesitant to approve the potentially live saving drug.
More
than making up for the previous film’s absence of narrative thrust, you would
never know this was from the same team.
Within the first five minutes of hearing a tear streaked father
describing how he ‘will go to the edge of the sky to save my child’, the film
has you by the throat. By the end of the
journey with these families you’ll be left with a variety of mixed emotions
about the tug of war battle between the Food and Drug Administration and the
families strategically racing uphill against time and bureaucratic loopholes to
save their children from the fatal disease.
Ditching
glossy reenactments in favor of direct, undoctored interviews with the parents
and cross-cutting between the families steps towards unifying against the FDA, To the Edge of the Sky is not only more
focused than the filmmakers’ previous effort it can stop the informed and
uninformed dead in their tracks. Coming
into the subject blank unaware of the severity of the disease until now, scenes
of a young boy walking back and forth in a hallway for a medical test before
his legs give out from under him are hard to shake.
While
I stand by my general dismissal of their previous film, the Wider brothers have
indeed displayed their true talents as compelling documentarians with To the Edge of the Sky for their ability
to paint a broad picture of the struggle families with children suffering from
muscular dystrophy experience. Whether
or not you or anyone in your immediate family suffers from the disease, anyone
can relate to a parent doing anything and everything to save their child from a
life threatening disease, even if it means going to war with a faceless
conglomerate to achieve that goal.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki