Good Hair
2009 (USA)
Director: Jeff Stilson
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (good)
Review by: Charlie Prince

There is something ironic, maybe even a little disturbing, about last night’s screening of Good Hair, which kicked off Livia Bloom’s new documentary series “Documentaries in Bloom” at the Maysles Institute in Harlem. As I discuss below, the film itself is excellent and stands out as one of this year’s must-see films. But as the latest in a seemingly endless series of documentaries that ends with a competition, Good Hair also exacerbates an alarming trend, which goes something like this: it’s not enough to document a compelling subject, these days you need something a little more entertaining — a twist ending, a Hollywood “arc” or, the recent overwhelming favorite, the inherent suspense of a competition. As I sat in the Maysles Institute last night, I couldn’t help but think that if this is the new model for documentaries, some of our most celebrated documentary filmmakers wouldn’t cut it today, perhaps not even the Maysles brothers themselves. How would their classic Salesman (1968) be received today? Can you imagine it recast to end in a competition among the salesman, as we all sat on the edge of our seats waiting to the end to see who would win?

That may sound silly, but if you sit back for a moment and think about recent breakout documentaries, the pattern is stunning: Spellbound (spelling bee competition), Wordplay (crossword competition), Air Guitar Nation (air guitar competition), King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters (king kong video game competition), Murderball (paralympic rugby competition) and Pulling John (arm-wrestling competition) to name a few. Now admittedly, they’re all wonderful, enjoyable films, but what makes Good Hair such a bizarre addition to this club is that at least these earlier documentaries are documenting something that’s inherently competitive. After all, it’s hard to fault Spellbound for being structured around a spelling bee. But with the surge of competition films that followed it’s also clearly a game of copycat, a gimmick that film producers can bank on as a “tried and true” pattern to ensure success. And it’s far more alarming to see this gimmick extended to Good Hair, a film whose premise has virtually nothing to do with the competition that anchors it.

So what was the premise for Good Hair? Chris Rock was inspired to make the film after his daughter asked him one day why she didn’t have “good hair”. From its prestigious launch at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, audiences have been unanimous that this is a fascinating premise with significant implications for our society and what we as a country are telling young African-American women what is or is not “beautiful”. How in the world would Chris Rock’s 5 year old daughter think to ask that? The film tracks Rock’s journey to answer that question, which in a nutshell reveals that not only is his daughter’s insecurity about her hair widespread, but there’s a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds off of it — much of it overseas. But after the first third of the film explores the startling chemical dangers posed by the widespread use of “relaxers” (increasingly on very young children), and the middle of the film focuses on the shockingly expensive and at times cult-like society of hair weaves, the final third of the film, as has been foreshadowed from the beginning, must inevitably end with a competition. Each year there is an annual hair conference in Atlanta, which culminates in an absurd and entertaining showdown in which a handful of hair stylists have turned hair styling into a performance art. As we watch the performers cut hair upside down, alongside a marching band or even underwater (!), it becomes pretty clear that the actual hair styling seems to be mostly an afterthought.

What’s also clear is that the hair competition does pretty much nothing to help answer the question posed by Chris Rock’s 5 year old daughter, or otherwise explain why society as a whole convinces African-American women that their natural hair isn’t beautiful. As much as I enjoy the film, it’s hard to deny why the hair competition is there — it’s a gimmick, plain and simple. Producer Nelson George was on hand after the film for a Q&A and I asked him why they structured the film around a competition. He said point blank “the competition saves the film”, essentially because it guarantees that the film had something that felt like an ending. “Before you make a documentary, you need to know what your ending is” he explained, pointing out that without an ending, you could just go on editing your film for years. Fair enough, but would Salesman or Gimme Shelter fail that test today? And even so, why a competition? Especially here where it seems off-topic and forced?

To be honest, I can’t really fault the filmmakers behind Good Hair for ending the film the way they did. After all, it’s notoriously difficult for a documentary film to get a commercial release, let alone make real money back on its investment, and here Good Hair is on track to be the highest grossing documentary of the year. But it is a sad reflection of the state of documentary filmmaking, and the reality that the Spellbound model for a competition has become a one-size-fits-all form, an easy off-the-shelf solution for ending documentaries. It raises more complicated questions about whether today’s documentaries are being forced into the model of the classic Hollywood arc, and whether that means that the primary purpose of a commercial documentary is to entertain rather than inform. I’ll admit that as an aspiring documentary filmmaker myself, I find that pretty discouraging, alarming even. But then again, film trends are always evolving and it could always just be a fad. Perhaps after the success this year of The Cove we’ll now see a series of documentaries incorporating another Hollywood gimmick — the “heist film” documentary. And regardless, if the lesson from all this is that Salesman wouldn’t be celebrated if it were made today, maybe I should just get over it — after all the film was playing at the Maysles Institute itself!

Though I do think the ending to Good Hair is tacked on, and has discouraging implications for modern documentaries, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an excellent film and worth seeing. Speaking of which, it will be playing at the Maysles Institute again tonight (more information here) and I encourage you to check out the film. Though if you’re running short on time, you may want to skip the ending.