Sr. Documentary review: Endearing meta film that brims with wit, candour, and catharsis

4/5

Story:

Hollywood superstar Robert Downey Jr. turns the camera onto himself and guides it through the insides of his home, his past, and his future in this intimate, full-of-heart Netflix documentary. The prime focus of this exercise is his late father and the legend of American underground cinema, Robert Downey Sr., from whom he has gathered a vast chunk of his personality - as Downey Sr. encounters the sunset days of his life, son Downey Jr. embarks on a quest to understand who his father is right now, in those poignant moments and instinctively turns his gaze towards his old man's vibrant past, the foundation of the bizarreness he carried, and much more. In short, Sr. is an ode to a father through the process of unravelling his vast mind.

Review:

Fathers and Sons are known to live vicariously through one another and few people other than the Bob Downeys can enunciate this phenomenon more splendidly.

For Robert Downey Sr., a major figure of the American counterculture that thrived during and post-Vietnam war, cinema was a mode of capturing a peculiar kind of creative zest, one that transcended conventions and norms and instead tapped into the reserves of human freedom. As a filmmaker, Sr. operated outside the periphery of Hollywood and prolifically went about exploring his curiosities about social structures and behaviours through a set of highly idiosyncratic films - Putney Swope, Pound, and Greaser's Place, to name a few. His life, much like his cinema, was independent in every sense of the word. At the same time, his cinematic legacy, which has inspired filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Paul Thomas Anderson, improperly remained away from mass consumption and the ancillary commercial rewards, despite the cultishness it carried all along.

His son, Robert Downey Jr., though cut from the same cloth, had a starkly contrasting life and career in cinema. His lengthy filmography includes as many as 8 appearances in his father's films with the first one dating back to 1970, when he was only five years old. Downey Sr.'s great gusto for life and his tempestuous attitude had strong impressions on his son and Jr., quite strikingly so, carried the same ethos through his adulthood and the youth that followed. As an actor, Robery Downey Jr. is one of the highest-paid actors in the world today but his life has ebbed and flowed through early acting adventures, substance abuse, run-ins with the law, and a lot more before it encountered rise to unprecedented stardom. It was a life that was as unplanned and extemporaneous as his father's filmmaking style and also highly reflective of the influence that Sr. had on him all along. And yet, by his own admission, their relationship had a sense of aloofness that never allowed Downey Jr. to fully unravel the mind of his the Sr., and as he now experiences the myriad facets of parenting and familial life, it was about time that he forayed into understanding the vibrancy of his father and what made him tick.

In the latest Netflix original documentary, Hollywood superstar Robert Downey Jr. embarks on an intimate journey to get closer to his father Robert Downey Sr. and pay not just a tribute to his legacy but also capture the latter's acid wit and the bizarre-but-endearing outlook towards life. 

"I think you should put that in the film"

Sr., the film, is essentially a series of jumbled-up anecdotes that carry little traces of the late underground filmmaker's relentless pursuit of the unexplored, of the forbidden, and of the absurd in everyday life - in fact, the docu.picture is also a vivid meta film because we get to see the crew follow Downey Sr. into one of his last cinematic expeditions as he tries to walk down a memory lane through New York for the sake of both posterity and nostalgia. He also lets the camera to unflinchingly capture every detail, often allowing it to meander, be intrusive almost, and help the narrative take unexpected forms. 

"I think you should put that in the film," says Bob Downey Sr. on numerous occasions as he coalesces with the film crew, often sharing his two cents on filmmaking and cinematic grammar in his quintessential restrained manner. Perhaps this is why Sr. feels less like a manufactured piece of cinema and instead a beautiful, scattered collection of moments playing out between a father and a son.

"That's worthy of an evening's nonsense"

But what does Sr., the project, represent for Robery Downey Jr.? On several occasions in the film, Downey refers to his days of drug addiction and does so in a tone that's a mixture of regret, slyness, and humour - but at no point does he make it the agenda. Instead, he turns his gaze towards his father, lets his old man be the catalyst and the navigator of his own film, and simply lurks in the background to add context to Downey Sr.'s stories. A majority of the film is played out in conversations between the father and the son, either seated side-by-side and Downey Jr. reaching out over a series of phone calls, and it is through these seemingly mundane exchanges that the film blossoms into a cathartic experience for the two.

Robert Downey Jr. shares that before they began filming Sr., he wasn't sure that the film would take three years to be put together, and whether his father, who was only recently diagnosed with Parkinson's, would be fit enough to participate. Regardless, it would seem that Jr. forged on and helped his father wade through his illness so that the resulting film is rendered as a gift and an ode to an ailing man. We see Downey tear up, or remain on the verge of it on numerous occasions, during those tender moments and fittingly so, one of the film's concluding moments is the warm embrace entangling all the three Downey generations (including Downey Jr.'s son Exton). 

Verdict:

Sr. is a strikingly beautiful film for many reasons - aside from the tenderness and the wit it carries, the gorgeous black-and-white palette adds to the detailing and allows for the sombreness to reside naturally in the narrative. Chris Smith, who has previous work like American Movie and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond espoused the charm of independent and quirky filmmaking, lets the main subject of Sr. be his film's guiding force and quite lucidly, allows for the doc. to evolve into a meta film: Robert Downey Sr., unwilling to rest his swords yet, goes about making a film within the film and Smith is more than welcoming of his penchants. For fans of Robert Downey Jr., the actor will be spotted baring his soul more often than not in the film and one of the main charms of the film is how he sheds all the frills of his life as a superstar and surrenders himself as a son (and father) first.