Pam and I saw the critically acclaimed documentary this weekend ... very thought provoking. Then again, I fucking love good documentaries.

Semi-spoilers follow (I don't think you can really have a spoiler in a documentary, unless you're talking about something like the ending of "Timothy Leary's Dead").

A salient observation: I think the movie isn't about how a family falls apart during a crisis, as the film is often summarized, so much as how disparately people react to a traumatic event. I found the intrafamilial relationships less interesting than the internal ones.

One son is on a near-crusade to tell his side of the story; another is literally absent from the film. The father is surreal in his denial, joyfully playing the piano the day before his incarceration; the mother enters a year-long hysteria.

Similarly, by presenting contradictory accounts and perspectives (overall sympathetic to the family — but it would have to be, to open your mind and prevent you from dismissing them outright) the film's ambiguity gets the audience's own dissonant reactions to parallel the subjects'.

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