Movie Thoughts: Buddy (2018)

• Released: November 17, 2018
  
• Directed by: Henny Honingmann
  
• Running time: 1 h 26 min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

A documentary that takes a look at various service dogs and what they mean to their owners.

My Thoughts

Honestly an interesting concept for a documentary. The director interviews six or so people with various disabilities and neurodivergencies, such as PTSD, trouble walking, blindness, autism, etc. Each of them have their own service dog. The director interviews them and shows what the dogs do for their owners, and what they mean to them.

Too bad the execution of this documentary is pretty darn bad. It's not the people interviewed or their stories at all: those are all interesting and well-told. It's mostly the direction and editing that brings this whole thing down.

About the editing: it's horrible and feels amateur. There's huge empty areas of nothing happening, such as dead silences between interviews or just clips that don't add anything to the documentary that where left in for whatever reason. There's also little to no music or background noise in these scenes, so that doesn't distract from the nothing happening on screen, either. A competent editor knows what scenes to leave in and what to edit out. If it doesn't do anything for the documentary on a narrative, illustrative or emotional level, why leave it in? I feel like this thing could've easily been trimmed down five or ten minutes or so without any of the narrative getting lost.

Second: the director. She interviews these people, and asks some quite inappropriate questions or makes inappropriate remarks that are honestly just a bit ableist, even if it isn't her intention. When she's interviewing the man who has PTSD and he mentions he has horrible nightmares, her response to that is a patronizing "that's all?". And when the service dog of the blind man passes away and he keeps her collar as something to memorize her by, she makes the very clever remark alongside the lines of "a photo won't mean anything to you anyways". Just...why make these stupid remarks? If you're making a documentary about these people and their dogs the very least you can do is be respectful towards them. They are already sharing extremely personal and sometimes traumatizing experiences with the world in front of a camera, which can't be easy. Why bring them down with these remarks?

So overall this documentary boils down to "good concept, bad execution". The director needs to really think before she speaks during these interviews, and they should've hired a different editor altogether. While the stories these people were telling were all interesting, the shitty editing made it very hard to keep paying attention.