Minding the Gap
Growing up, figuring out who you are, and how to manage an adult life, is never easy. It must be particularly difficult when you grow up in a troubled home. Bing Liu, Zack Mulligan and Kiere Johnson all know about that, and throughout the 93 minutes of Liu’s powerful documentary, “Minding the Gap,” we’ll see how their respective situations growing up have left them ill-prepared for adulthood, and the challenges they’ll face.
Seeing these three struggle through a combination of current footage, filmed over a span of years, and archival video shot by Liu, I found myself thinking of my own life. I didn’t live with the same difficulties these three did, but when I hit adulthood, it took a long time for me to figure out how to maneuver through life, much less know what I wanted to do with mine. Correction on that last part: I “knew” what I wanted to do, it was just a matter of figuring out how to make it happen. I put that “knew” in quotations because the truth is, that was what I thought I wanted, not what I would come to realize I wanted to do. That’s the mindset the three protagonists of “Minding the Gap” all have throughout much of it; it’s only through self-reflection, and painful truths, that they will come to realize they didn’t quite have it figured out, afterall.
If you’re familiar with the film, and it’s premise, you’ll know that there are two key pieces of the story I’m leaving out that connect Zack, Bing and Kiere, and while I won’t divulge one here, the other one is revealed early on in the film, and sets the backdrop of the film. These three young men first bonded over their shared love of skateboarding, and much of the archival footage the Liu shares is of them at a skater’s park when they’re teenagers, and over the years, Liu’s footage reveals much about these three- sometimes things we pick up on, but they won’t for many years- beyond just what skateboarding means to them. We meet other people like Bing’s brother Kent; Zack’s on-and-off girlfriend, Nina; and Kiere’s mother. All three play key parts of the story to come, and the trio’s relationships to them will illuminate who they are now, and who they might become.
This is the sort of documentary that will dig deep into the soul of some viewers, and it definitely did me. Liu is brilliant in how he shoots and edits this footage, and how he creates the emotional responses we will have to the people he is following in this film. This film had me thinking of my own life, my own journey into manhood, and being a man of responsibility. It has that same impact of Apted’s “Up” documentaries, of Steve James’s “Hoop Dreams,” of Errol Morris’s “Gates of Heaven” and “Vernon, Florida” in how it creates a personal connection with individuals whose lives might not be fully similar like our own, but struggle with the same questions we do. How they come out the other side is one of the most emotionally potent experiences a film can deliver, and why the documentary form is such an important cinematic storytelling medium to utilize for filmmakers, and welcome into our lives as moviegoers. Liu has made a great one here.
