Like the best sports documentaries, and as expected from a filmmaker like Lucy Walker, whose films to date have shown no particular interest in sport, The Crash Reel is not actually a sports documentary at all. Kevin Pearce was, for a time, the world's premier snowboarder. Amid training for the 2010 Winter Olympics, he missed a landing and experienced a fall so severe it almost killed him. This lively, vivid film externalises an internal world, shading every real-life occurrence depicted herein with a multitude of thoughts and emotions, drawn out from the minds of its subjects. It is Pearce's mind, damaged as much by the life he left behind him due to his injury as by the life he must now face, that is most benevolent in supplying Walker with material more intimate and complex than one might imagine, not least from a film that starts out in such spirit that you wouldn't believe it could ever get so deep. Deep, but not sombre. Pearce, his friends and family display such unguarded honesty with their opinions and their feelings before Walker's camera that their discourse has the timbre of the best scripted drama, only in fact intensified by the plain fact that it is neither scripted nor acted. Walker finds a canny style of editing, scoring and subtitling to fit the film, with excellent soundtrack choices and an astute vibrancy of tone, adjusting imperceptibly yet meaningfully to flow with the progression of events. The Crash Reel, in the end, isn't just like the best sports documentaries. It's one of the best.
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