AllYourTV.com
One of the biggest challenges for any documentary maker is to bring a fresh point of view to the subject they're covering. That's especially a challenge when you're doing a film about something as seemingly well-covered as eating disorders. After twenty or so years of made-for-TV movies, tell-all books and endless magazine articles, many people might assume they know all they need to know about the subject.
"Thin" is Lauren Greenfield's fly-on-the-wall study of four young clients of the Renfrew Center, a Florida facility for young women with eating disorders. It takes a sparse, unblinking look at the subject and at the women struggling with their demons.
Greenfield obtained amazing access to the women and the facility and the resulting footage is often so raw and direct that it almost hurts to watch. The women are in such pain, such self-denial that as you watch the movie, you often just want to reach into the screen and shake some sense into them.
The movie spares no one, from the families of the women to the insurance companies that refuse to pay for the level of treatment required by the women. The struggles and day-to-day challenges are so profound and consuming that its amazing the women ever find some sort of balance in their lives.
There are a number of heartbreaking stories in the film, but probably the hardest to watch is the one of 15-year-old Brittany. The waif-like high-schooler is perhaps the toughest case of any of the women at Renfrow. She's not just battling her disease, but peer pressure at school and a mother who seems to essentially be anorexic herself.
In a truly horrifying sequence towards the end of the film, Brittany is told her insurance won't pay for any more treatment, and as she spends one last day in the facility, she has a meltdown that is difficult to forget.
As she sits in a group meeting and talks, she cries that she just needs to lose some weight, that she's tired of all the pressure, that she just wants people to leave alone so she can die. Frail, hair wispy due to starvation, she's the textbook picture of a patient on the edge. And yet, somehow her insurance company feels she doesn't deserve the help.
While Brittany's struggle is the most jarring, every women followed in the documentary lives a life equally balanced by pain and self-deception. Shelly is a psychiatric nurse who has had a feeding tube inserted in her stomach for five years. And yet, she also uses the tube as an easy way to purge herself. She lies to herself and to her family. She wants to get better, but she's also glib enough to try and say the right things without truly changing her behavior.
And then there's Alisa, a divorced mother of two who tells a counselor she joined the Air Force during Desert Storm to lose weight. She is articulate and seems to want to get better. At the same time, she also is no where near being able to control her urges. At a dinner the evening after she is released from Renfrew (thanks to another caring insurance company), she carefully scrapes the dressing off the lettuce of her salad. And later, when she's alone in her bedroom, she purges and purges herself.
Even the patients who seem to be best handling the pressure are only a beat away from an emotional collapse. When 29-year-old Polly is booted from Renfrew after she broke several of the facility's rules, she and the staff call her mother to tell her she's coming home. Her mom begins crying, begging the staff to reconsider, as Polly breaks down, wailing that she's sorry that she has screwed up again. It's a startling change from the women who has appeared to be not just recovering, but thriving at Renfrow. And it illustrates just how challenging the treatment of eating disorders can be.
Some groups have complained that "Thin" only shows the challenges and failures of treatment and not the successes. While there is some validity in that complaint, this isn't a story about successes or triumphs. It's a portrait of the challenges and the battles that aren't won.
"Thin" deserves as wide an audience as is possible, because it offers up a slice of life that most people are lucky enough to not experience first hand.
"Thin" premieres on HBO on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006.