…Another Sundance doc is also a wonderful portrait of an unexpected lifetime. Steve James, who directed “Hoop Dreams,” is here with “Reel Paradise,” the story of a New Yorker named John Pierson, who distributed and represented the films of Spike Lee, Kevin Smith and many other indie directors, and hosted “Split Screen,” an IFC program on independent films.
He grew tired of doing the same job day after day, he said, and decided to move with his wife, Georgia, teenage daughter Janet and middle-school son Wyatt to — well, to Taveuni, one of the smaller and more obscure of the Fiji Islands. There they would reopen the local movie theater and show movies — mostly free — for a year.
Steve James joined the Pierson family for the last month of their year to shoot this film. You might wonder if there is much of a film to shoot: Movie nut goes tropical, shows Buster Keaton, “Matrix” and “Jackass” to cheering local audiences. But James has a knack, a gift or a curse of turning up when dramatic things are happening. The closing scenes of “Hoop Dreams” outrival fiction, for example.
Here, what happens is such intriguing human drama that we realize: This is what reality TV could be like if it had a brain and a soul. Pierson’s experiment in Fiji is a great success, despite travails with unpredictable projectionists. The theater is jammed with audiences who scream with delight more or less nonstop through everything, which is why Buster Keaton is so popular: With a silent film, you don’t need to hear the dialogue. He also shows “Apocalypse Now,” over the objections of Wyatt, an uncommonly smart and realistic kid who predicts no one will come, and observes that “most indie films are boring.”
Meanwhile, Janet has become best friends with Miriama, a girl her age, and goes through a period of wanting to stay out later than her mother thinks is wise. It’s the usual teenage rebellion stuff, made simpler because her Fijian friends are good kids. But then there are two thefts, including John and Georgia’s laptop computers, and suspicion descends — not on Miriama, but in general. It feels like betrayal.
Still, the family loves their decision to spend a year on the other side of the world, and Wyatt observes that in New York, he might have five kids in his house in a week, but in Fiji, he never had less than five friends in the house at any given time. The movie is about families, cultural differences, ideas of raising children — and about movies. If I had seen “Jackass” in John Pierson’s theater with those 300 uproariously happy kids, I might have liked it. I certainly would have understood it better.
The film, produced by View Askew, is currently looking for a distributor at Sundance.
