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The Crash Reel

Posted by Anne M on Wednesday, Mar 12, 2014

index Running up to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Kevin Pearce, a talented snowboarder favored to compete for the United States, struck his head while training on a half-pipe in Park City, Utah. He suffered a traumatic brain injury resulting in years of rehabilitation, as well as the end of Pearce’s career on the board. Pearce’s accident, his recovery, and the effect of his injuries on his family are covered in Lucy Walker’s documentary, The Crash Reel.

While the documentary is strong in portraying coming to terms with finding a new purpose in life, I wasn’t convinced by how the director told the story. Originally, I came away from The Crash Reel thinking that the injury wasn’t the intended subject of the film, but rather his rivalry with Shaun White. The way the documentary was framed, the content of events leading up to the injury, filming during the recovery process, and the comments from interviewees all seemed to point to the idea that Lucy Walker started one place and had to steer the film in a whole other direction. The crash changed what the documentary was about.  However, I am surprised that this isn’t the case at all.

In a screening event covered by Filmmaker, Walker discussed how she met Pearce six months after the accident. She put together a large portion of the film from sports coverage, family videos of the recovery, and amateur videos from other snowboarders (one of these covers the fall), which is why the film seems disjointed in its filming and narrative. Many documentaries do this very thing, but Walker tries to sew all these scenes together as if it was all an organic creation. Because of this, you question if this a documentary about Pearce’s snowboarding talents?  Is this about rivalries? Is this about the huge risks of traumatic brain injuries in extreme sports?

The film is about all these things, but it’s at its best when The Crash Reel is about how an individual can rebuild a new life for oneself and find a new identity. Pearce was a snowboarder and it takes everything from his doctors, his family, and himself to see that he can’t be a snowboarder anymore. But he does and this film shows how he gets there and it’s worth seeing for this alone.

About the Author

Anne M's picture

Anne Mangano has worked for the Iowa City Public Library since 2007, serving as the Collection Services Coordinator since 2013. In this position, she oversees the Library’s collection, including the selection, cataloging, processing, repair, and removal of materials. She also plans and directs ICPL’s digital collections, including the Local...

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    "A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history Kentucky, 1850. Jarrett, an enslaved groom, and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. As the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name painting the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack. New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a 19th equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance. Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly drawn to one another through their shared interest in the horse - one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred, Lexington, who became America's greatest stud sire, Horse is a gripping, multi-layered reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America"--

    amangano's picture

    I enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’ “Horse.” It read fast, I suppose like it’s main subject, one of the greatest racehorses in US history, Lexington. I loved the central idea: what parts of our history seem so important at the time they occur, then forgotten and discarded, only to be found with new meaning. This story centers on a discarded painting of a horse and some equine bones in a Smithsonian storage facility. From that idea, people, places, events are vividly captured on the page: this horse is important in so many different ways. The novel recreates the relationship between Jarrett, an enslaved horse trainer and Lexington, as well as those who come into contact with the painting of Jarret. There was something disjointed and uneven about the narrative, especially the interplay between the past and present. While Jarrett’s story in the 1850’s and 1860’s was deeply rich, the other characters seemed like afterthoughts, there only to make the connection from the past to the present. Perhaps that is the point. Brooks is trying to draw attention to and bring to life through fiction an individual that was unnoted and forgotten but central to racing history. I’ll be thinking more about this at length, which is all I ask of a book. -Anne M
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