Countdown To Zero and Waste Land director Lucy Walker returns with a heart-warming documentary on former snowboarding champ Kevin Pearce who suffered a traumatic brain injury a little over a month before the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Blessed with access to terrific home videos, and a family who allow Walker to film their most intimate moments, The Crash Reel kick off introducing the uninitiated who Kevin Pearce is, what he's achieved, what he had to go to achieve that, and who the person is under the goggles. With his perpetual grin, easy-going nature and foppish hair, Pearce cuts a likeable figure – Walker goes to unneeded lengths to drum up something more than friendly rivalry between Pearce and Shaun White, however. Pearce is cool, a frend (sic); White is 'a robot,' 'a machine.'
Walker keeps the documentary going with driving music over chop-chop-chop MTV cutting; in a surprise turn, the full thirteen minutes of Underworld's Mmm Skyscraper, I Love You is used. But you're waiting for the accident and Walker delivers it without warning; caught on film by his friends, the scene is presented as just another fun run by Pearce. Then he falls, the music stops, and the serious starts.
Following his gruelling recovery, Walker takes us step-by-step through the achingly slow process but it's only when Pearce has recovered enough to suggest that he wants to return to professional snowboarding that The Crash Reel moves from being an interesting TV documentary to an engrossing and moving drama. Pleading with him to rethink, Pearce's mother and his Down's Syndrome brother bring such tenderness and heart. The Crash Reel isn't satisfied with just that either, highlighting the extremes the athletes are forced to go through with the height of the half rim walls constantly raised, and the lack of compensation if and when something goes wrong.
Cut close for the operations, as Pearce's hair grows back it Samson-like restores him to something of his former self, only to be forced to accept that he's not the man he used to be and he will never be, which draws parallels with his brother's difficulty in accepting his Down's Syndrome.
A little overlong but it's touching stuff.