‘Blood Brother’ Has Genuine Spirit Despite Limitations

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Rating: 3.0/5.0

Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize in Documentary and Audience Award at Sundance 2013, “Blood Brother” is a film about a great Pittsburgh guy by the name of Rocky, who left America to create a new life in India. Over the course of three years, he became a rock star at a shelter for children with AIDS, caring for them in all manners, and creating strong relationships with them.

The film is made with a Rogen-on-Franco level bromance by Rocky’s self-proclaimed best friend, Steve Hoover. After sharing with us a brief overview of Rocky’s history as a soul from a broken family, Hoover then journeys to the shelter in India himself with Rocky, to make a travelogue into Rocky’s life and those who have changed it. During this time in the land, they undergo a whole spectrum of human experiences, understanding how a completely different part of the world exists.

Blood Brother
Photo credit: Cinedigm

“Blood Brother” is a film with genuine spirit, a component that becomes a definitive aspect of its experience. By its setup it may seem like a typical college applicant “mission essay” (“I wanted to change them, but they changed me,” as the cliché goes) but its numerous amount of various shared experiences, and its dedication to sharing the stories of many children, show that film’s intentions are in the right place with such heavy moments of reality. For a good chunk of it, “Blood Brother” is a perfectly fine, hard-to-deny story - a good-looking, good-mannered American becomes superhero to adorable kids who themselves need a grand father figure, and they all encounter the strangeness of life in the process. There is something to be said about finding a good character for a film, as Hoover has in his friend. But there’s also something to enjoy about witnessing such uncommon selflessness.

This is Hoover’s film, but it is entirely from Rocky’s point of view. Hoover’s part in the movie, or the way that he presents himself, is that he just goes along with what is happening. But while Rocky’s tale makes for half of a striking narrative, Hoover’s own outsider experience seems as important too. After all, in more direct terms of documentary construction, he is the one who will ultimately be putting this work together (though it would certainly be interesting for a documentary director to let their subject play el capitan in the editing room). Interestingly enough, Rocky says at the end of the film that he has always wanted Steve to record his wedding. Steve certainly tells his buddy’s story with the same neutrality of a wedding video, not willing to dive into his subject or give dimension to him, but present things at the shinier face value. At the very least, a film project like “Blood Brother” makes for one hell of a memento gift for a guy to celebrate his friend’s accomplishments.

The overall impact of “Blood Brother” stops short though because of such protection with his subject, despite the acknowledgment that there are rough scenes that have been captured by Hoover. This doesn’t concern some type of invasion of privacy, but with footage of what Hoover has already collected. In one moment, the voiceover indicates that he gets arrogant and rude, and is followed by a scene in which he very strikingly yells at one of the girls (who is off-screen) to shut up. There is another moment later in which Rocky is shown carrying a box of pizzas for hospital friends through a distinctly impoverished area. Hoover’s voiceover introduces a conflict that is had amongst the small crew, and then there is off-screen dialogue about one person’s discomfort with it. But a more full picture of these events, and the attitudes behind the emotions in these events is not given; the issue goes nowhere. Instead, these are just little footnotes that claim to make him more complicated, but fail to do so.

Blood Brother
Photo credit: Cinedigm

As an assembled film, “Blood Brother” shows some shabbiness in composition with distracting dissonance between sound and image. The voiceover, often with Rocky expressing himself, is sometimes paired with footage that doesn’t match. When he talks about disappointment (“I felt like an idiot, what was I doing?”) the film shows us a black crow, standing by the ledge of a building. Is it poetry, or just treating specific B-roll like stock footage, mashing them together to see if any artistic significance sticks? Too often “Blood Brother” distracts with this dilemma, when likely a nicely composed shot of Rocky would do just fine.

Building its heart around a distinct location and experience, one that I’d wager will be firsthand foreign to many of this film’s viewers for their entire time on Earth, the film raises a striking point about the whole mission of “Blood Brother”. As someone says in voiceover about the documentary, “It’s so weird, because you just can’t put it on camera. The experience - you can’t capture it.”

Indeed, film is but a medium that uses only two of the five senses, with the more immediate aspects like touching or taste only left to be imagined, if even regarded at all. But still, there is an untapped depth in this story that could be shared in the presentation of such a special experience. Even when they are being made for a best friend, documentaries don’t have to be so transparent, or so protective. Regardless of how wonderful something may be, or how undeniably genuine a person’s motivations may be, life is always a bit more complicated than that.

By NICK ALLEN Editor & Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com nick@hollywoodchicago.com