Philadelphia Morning News
IF YOU HAVE a teenage daughter or a friend struggling with weight issues, you should make tonight a TV movie night.
Tune into HBO at 9 p.m. and you'll meet 15-year-old Brittany, who went from 185 pounds to 97 in just a year. She and her mom play a disgusting chew and spit game. They put candy in their mouths and bite down, but don't actually swallow.
Then there's Shelly, who's fed through a tube in her stomach because she won't eat. And Alisa, a 30-year-old mother of two who enlisted in the Air Force during Operation Desert Storm just to shed some pounds. And Polly, a cigarette-smoking, tattooed 29-year-old who vomits on cue.
These poor, sick women are the unlikely stars of the HBO documentary "Thin: If It Takes Dying to Get There, So Be It." Directed by noted photographer Lauren Greenfield, it follows the women's experiences at a Renfrew Center treatment facility in Florida.
This is a disturbing, behind-the-scenes look at the treatment of eating disorders, which scar the lives of an estimated 5 million sufferers. You watch as skeletal women are coaxed to eat or choke down vitamin-enriched drinks. You listen as they tell desperate stories of wanting to be thin. Polly attempted suicide after downing two slices of pizza.
And you wonder what could possibly be wrong with these women. What drives otherwise intelligent people to starve themselves to the point that their bodies resemble a concentration camp survivor's?
Witnessing Shelly's struggle to eat a single vanilla cupcake on her birthday, you sense that the level of self-loathing these women have is about far more than dieting down to a certain size. The Renfrew patients, who look and act far younger than their years, are at war with themselves and their bodies. There are a lot of tears in this film.
"Thin" doesn't offer solutions or explanations. The camera merely follows the women through their days, sneaking cigarettes, getting weighed, meeting with therapists.
It's interesting to observe how staffers at Renfrew, which has its headquarters in Andorra, relate to their charges. Some employees are morbidly obese. During one puzzling scene, a cook jokes about wanting to drop some weight. It makes you wonder if he's forgotten where he works.
"I feel like one of the things about an eating disorder that makes it hard to understand... is that it looks so similar to what we see every day, which is this kind of obsessive dieting that many, many people participate in," says Greenfield. "And I think sometimes it gets trivialized as an illness."
A noted still photographer, she decided to film women wrestling with anorexia nervosa and bulimia while completing her last book, "Girl Culture" (Chronicle Books, $40), which explores how girls define themselves by their looks.
By the way, none of the four women spotlighted in "Thin" is cured. They all eventually wind up back in the real world, facing their struggles on their own, one meal at a time. In fact, the last footage of the diminutive Alisa shows her throwing up her dinner in a toilet as her children watch television nearby.
Watching her calmly clean up after her relapse, you have the impression that it's just part of her normal routine and that Alisa could be any woman, anywhere, similarly endangering her health.
That's what makes these women's stories so riveting, and the documentary so worth watching.