Little Empty Boxes
Directed by Max Lugavere and Chris Newhard
Unrated
Runtime: 109 minutes
Opens in New York on April 19 and LA on April 26

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Well, this doesn't feel good. I mean that with total sincerity and I mean it literally: I have felt like crap since the credits for the new documentary Little Empty Boxes rolled and I knew I would have to write negatively about a person filming his mother succumbing to Parkinson's and Lewy Body Dementia. I can't pretend I wasn't uncomfortable for most of the experience, though.

Little Empty Boxes is a movie that gets worse the more you think about it. An example: Early in the film, co-director Max Lugavere-- the other co-director, Chris Newhard, does not appear in the film-- has been talking with Kathy, his mother, and she isn't doing well. After some thought, he invites his publicist, identified only as Onelia (some people get last names, some don't) over to his house. Max tells Onelia he's moving away for an indeterminate amount of time to care for his mother. Max lives in Los Angeles and Kathy's in New York City, so this is a significant change. He makes a living as a health food author and podcaster, but he can't honestly balance that against his need to care for Kathy as her physical and mental health deteriorates, so he decides to pack up and head across the country. Onelia pushes back-- Max's career is surging and this "pivot isn't on-brand." He doesn't care, saying he doesn't like the jobs he's been auditioning for anyway. He's going to New York. It's an admirable choice. But as he opens the door for his publicist and you watch Max tell her he's freezing all of their plans and he doesn't know when he'll be able to thaw them out again, you realize there are two ways this scene could have been shot.

In the first, this documentary is an authentic record of reality and Max has just caught Onelia completely off guard, informing his publicist live, on the spot, that one of her clients isn't going to be working with her for the foreseeable future. The film is partially shot in that weird reality TV style that really caught on post-Catfish, where the director talks and films and then a second cameraperson films the director. If we're watching reality, we're watching a surprised person get semi-fired with two cameras in her face.

Alternatively, this scene could have been scripted. That would remove my concern for Onelia. If she knew what she was getting into, it wouldn't be so outwardly emotionally manipulative. If that's the case, though, Max is writing himself as making The Right Decision, making sure he's being recorded as he positions himself as a good guy, choosing to make his publicist appear to stand in the way of his love for his mother. It's like taking a selfie as you donate money, an act of documentation that throws the motives of one's actions into question. And I wouldn't have thought twice about it if the rest of the film didn't feel so gross. These things stack.

When we first see Kathy Lugavere in person, we learn she collects art, not only from known artists but from regular people with stalls at local flea markets. Her New York apartment is full of little sculptures and large, framed prints and it's beautiful, the kind of place you'd love to get a long tour of, to hear about the relationship its owner has with all of this cool stuff she's had an eye for. We don't get that tour, but we also don't learn much more about Kathy. It's partly where she is with her disease–in that scene, she tells Max she's seeing little tiny bugs in her bed, and her nurse says she's been emptying her drawers and taking her clothes off at random. She's only 63, but Kathy says she's afraid she's going to die soon. "So you feel like you're giving up?" her son asks. "I feel like I'm going to be giving up soon enough," she says. Maybe the directors were making the conscious decision to lock their movie on who Kathy was at the time of filming. Still, it's hard to swallow this characterization of the directors' intentions when the movie opens with home video footage, which is then sprinkled throughout the runtime. The first seconds of the movie explicitly don't focus on who Kathy was toward the end of her life.

Kathy has a hard time at the hospital. She gets mad at her son for reasons she can't explain. She enjoys getting out of her apartment and seeing the city she loves. But the movie treats her like she's already dead, or like she's never had an interior life. It's a sincerely painful lack of empathy. I was torn up watching Kathy's struggle, but I had no idea who she really was.

That feeling fully curdles halfway through, when the movie becomes something different. Leaving Kathy for the first time since her introduction, Little Empty Boxes begins to see Max learning about dementia from a handful of doctors. He wants to know why Kathy's dealing with everything she's dealing with, especially after her mother lived to 96 and was sharp until the end. Why would a regular woman decay so quickly? The answer, from his sample pool, is diet.

We hear that sugary cereal with milk is the mind killer. There's a very tortured metaphor about how sugar and antibiotics are making it more complicated to play Alzheimer's as a song on the piano (it doesn't make any more sense in context). We learn people develop Alzheimer's after surgeries and a doctor explains what a hippocampus does and points to the hippocampus on a generic brain scan so that we know where the hippocampus is in case we have to find it later. After we learn of the dangers of sugar, refined flour and breakfast cereal, we cut back to Kathy's apartment and a box of Honey Bunches of Oats sitting on her kitchen table is shot like it's a meat hook in a Saw movie.

This is all interspersed with some collage-style animation that cuts against the film's tone in some bizarre ways, i.e. we watch Dwight Eisenhower have a quick heart attack like it's a Looney Tunes gag and then we're told folks in the 50s were afraid of heart disease and cancer as little cartoon people die melodramatically, like these aren't real people and like we haven't been watching a real woman named Kathy losing her real memories. After a while, you realize the diet portion of the film has become the film. When we cut back to Kathy, it's so that Max can use the lessons he's learned from these doctors to try to reverse her conditions. We'll hear about brain inflammation and then hear Kathy charmingly mock-complaining about having to drink kombucha, but then we're quickly back to hearing that plant-based diets deny us necessary fats, etc. that the brain needs. The point of the movie becomes building a strong diet and Kathy turns into a minor character in her own film. When kimchi doesn't cure Kathy's dementia, Parkinson's and eventual cancer, some abrupt text tells us that her "cognition declined rapidly" for a year and she died in 2018.

Max is a person who cares about balanced diets. This is how he sees the world and that's fine. Revealing halfway through a documentary's runtime that it is an extended Dr. Oz segment, though, is ugly business.

Some of the best documentaries are about people facing death, from Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist to Dick Johnson is Dead. Those movies were more about the people they followed than Little Empty Boxes is. I knew who those people were. I knew what their lives had been like and I knew how they expressed themselves. I knew what they wanted out of the world. Once the doctors enter Little Empty Boxes, the directors start to frame Kathy's situation like she's just one of the millions of people who have dealt with similar problems. She's de-personalized, usurped by her son's need to have her snack on nuts instead of chips. "If only Kathy had eaten more fat and eggs and fermented foods," the movie starts to argue, "she'd be doing better." Maybe! But that isn't the movie I was presented with for forty minutes. That isn't useful in clarifying anything about the character of the person we're supposedly watching get profiled. That tells me nothing about what it was like for Kathy Lugavere to live her life.

If Max Lugavere wanted to film himself reacting to doctors telling him things, I wish he and Chris Newhard hadn't wrapped it in this package. I had a hard time watching Kathy get worse. I had a harder time watching her get treated less and less as a person and more like a cautionary tale, as a living reason why you should change your poor diet now, before it's too late and you're like her. I wished Kathy had been presented with more dignity. I wished somebody else had made this film. I wished some of the interviewed doctors had not been so condescending and smarmy in explaining the health troubles they claim people have brought on themselves. I felt like I had watched somebody use their loved one's death to sell supplements. It hurt. It'll hurt for a while. This one'll scoop your heart out.