Philadelphia Citypaper |
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"Screen Picks," Sam Adams - November 8, 2006 Thin (premieres Tue., Nov. 14, 9 p.m., HBO) "I just want to be thin," says Alisa, 30, a patient at the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Fla. "If it takes dying to get there, so be it." Like the other women in Lauren Greenfield's upsetting, unforgettable documentary, she has been struggling with eating disorders for most of her life. Thin offers only a few statistics on the breadth of eating disorders and only a smidgen of social critique. (Alisa, for one, traces her problems back to age 7, when a pediatrician told her parents she was fat.) What it offers instead is an unflinching look at the women who suffer, and suffer horribly, at the hands of such disorders, and how unbelievably tenacious their disease can be. There's Shelly, 25, who's learned to purge through the feeding tube in her stomach; Polly, 29, who slit her wrists after eating two pieces of pizza; and Brittany, 15, who in the year before her admission dropped from 185 to 97 pounds. In one of the movie's most telling sequences, Alisa is asked to draw an outline of her body as she sees it, and then shown the difference between her self-image and her actual, much slimmer, shape. But awareness doesn't come so easily, and the best Thin can hold out is a tentative hope for some (not all) of its subjects. But as much as you may be stunned by the depth of the women's pathology, you're awed by the bravery it takes to face it, and the sense that they'll be doing so for the rest of their lives. |