“Waiting For Superman” Left Viewer Needing Rescue

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Last night my girlfriend and I saw the Sundance hit “Waiting for Superman”, which is now playing in theaters nationwide.  I enjoyed the film, while she left the theater feeling extremely anxious about our two-year old’s prospects of getting a good education.

If you haven’t seen Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary (he also directed the 2007 Academy Award winner “An Inconvenient Truth”), I highly recommend that filmmakers study its composition for two reasons.

First, check out how Guggenheim employs a map animation that evolves over time to reveal meaningful statistics and key ideas.  This strategy of using an appealing graphic that “grows” through the course of the film has become an extremely popular and effective convention.  It’s ideal for topic-based documentaries that require a non-talking head vehicle for illustrating complex ideas.

Second, pay attention to the climax scene, which reveals whether the main characters win or lose at school district lotteries.  Guggenheim did a nice job building suspense, so much so that my girlfriend groaned during the apex scene, “This is awful!”

Not wanting to leave the audience feeling down, as so many social issue documentaries do, Guggenheim’s editors cleverly added an uplifting denouement. In the scene, one boy who was on the waiting list got a call revealing that he actually did get into his desired school. The film’s innovative credits also include more didactic calls to action, including “Text POSSIBLE to 77177”.

Despite these attempts to revive his audience from the doldrums of despair, my usually optimistic girlfriend left the theater distressed. “Sullivan is 2 now,” she said as we walked to the car. “By the time education is fixed, my kid’s going to be 18 years old!”

Lesson for filmmakers: don’t overestimate the power of depressing material to paralyze your audience. (I noticed she didn’t text “POSSIBLE”.)

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