Review: 'Little Empty Boxes'
Max Lugavere and Chris Newhard's combination of personal documentary and issue film reminds us where the latter genre has been and should be heading.
After celebrating my 47th birthday recently and feeling rather old, I found myself inspired by a couple of documentaries on how to live healthier and longer. These were not works I sought out because of my circumstances but were coincidental viewings for different work projects. One was Food, Inc. 2, the sequel to an Oscar-nominated documentary from 2008 aimed at changing both the industry and society as far as what we consume as buyers and eaters. The follow-up is another issue film with very high production value but low resonance. As noted in the April 5 edition of our This Week in Documentary newsletter, Food, Inc. 2 throws so much information and so many stories at the audience that little sticks other than the general ideas that ultra-processed foods are bad and corporations still suck for not caring at all.
Sure, the documentary had me looking at the foods I bought and choosing differently, just as the first Food, Inc. did temporarily 15 years earlier. It also made me fearful of the future of food, particularly with its spotlight on real meat made in a lab, somehow not coming from a living animal. Similarly, a 2023 Netflix docuseries that I caught up with the same week called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones left me thinking a lot about the foods I eat and why purple sweet potatoes and the Three Sisters diet could be keys to a longer lifespan. If I manage to stick to what I’ve learned, I’ll let you know how it went on my centenary in 2077. What I didn’t come away with from either of these two documentaries was a memory of the people and stories they told about, which means I’ll more likely forget the lessons I learned through them.
As we realized as early as 2016 (if not sooner) and discussed in our review of Growing Up Cody, there is tremendous value in letting the message and advocacy elements of issue films be secondary to the characters and narrative. Also: focusing on one story instead of several. In traditional issue films like Food, Inc. and its sequel, the multiple human-interest stories are in service of the message, and these documentaries tend to conclude with end titles promoting a website or campaign and directing the audience toward ways to help. But as Daniel Walber wrote in the Growing Up Cody review, with films that focus on “rich portraiture rather than narrow advocacy,” such as the one in question, “the people themselves are no longer props, but fully fleshed out individuals who struggle with complicated situations.”
Another new documentary I watched this week is again making me think about my diet (and sleep and exercise routines, or lack thereof), and its issue and message are likely to last longer in my mind due to the way they’re communicated. Max Lugavere and Chris Newhard’s Little Empty Boxes shares a lot of doctors’ opinions on what to eat and how to live to avoid Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, but it’s contained within the primary story of Lugavere assisting his mother, Kathy, as she begins to show signs of cognitive decline. The singular narrative makes us care about Kathy and her disease, which initially is thought to be just Parkinson’s but is ultimately diagnosed as Lewy body dementia after her memory and other brain functions start to fail alongside her symptoms involving motor functions.
The information on the believed cause of Kathy’s condition is provided in the middle of Little Empty Boxes in a way that sometimes fits organically into the story and sometimes does not. Lugavere interviews doctors and scientists about his mother’s disease both to understand it and in hopes of slowing its effects. Some of these interviews are part of the story in that they occur as Lugavere is accompanying Kathy to hospitals and doctors’ offices for tests and treatment and learning the info at that moment. Others are more formal talking head style interviews and serve the more investigatory aspect of the documentary that occasionally gives it a conventional “issue film” feel. These were presumably shot later as Lugavere and Newhard shaped the film into something more than a mere first-person mother-and-son tearjerker.
The latter approach to acquiring and presenting such information is directed at the audience more than Lugavere’s personal interests and fulfills the issue film side of the documentary. Little Empty Boxes was produced in association with the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, meaning it is at least partly designed to provide awareness and education on the broader subject of the film alongside Kathy’s specific story. For a brief section of the documentary, the issue and message seem to become the primary focus, served by Lugavere and Kathy’s story rather than being the other way around, supplemental or contextual to the character and narrative drive. However, in the end, marked by what is communicated by the titles appearing before the credits, the film reminds us that it is first and foremost about Kathy.
The mix of the personal and the informative doesn’t always work mainly because so much of the former winds up being about Lugavere too. Kathy can’t function enough as a main character, and the story is often Lugavere’s journey. There’s one awkward scene early in Little Empty Boxes in which Lugavere, then a little-known on-air TV personality, sits down with his publicist and explains that he’s leaving Hollywood and pausing his career to help take care of his mother in New York. It comes off as highly staged and self-important. There are also montages in the documentary showcasing Lugavere’s morning routine of eating a high-protein breakfast of bacon and eggs and his practice of doing yoga, indicating that he was a diet- and exercise-conscious person before his experience with Kathy even began.
Lugavere has since become a successful author following the experiences shown in the documentary, which was filmed in the mid-2010s. His books include the 2018 bestseller Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life and the cookbook Genius Kitchen: Over 100 Easy and Delicious Recipes to Make Your Brain Sharp, Body Strong, and Taste Buds Happy, which were informed by what he learned about the connection between diet and dementia during that time. Knowing that his mother’s disease and his experience with her propelled his career in a new direction makes Little Empty Boxes appear to be in service to and background material for his ongoing professional cause. That doesn’t mean it’s any less effective as a whole, though it does complicate its purpose as a work of character-driven documentary storytelling with an underlying issue and message component.
Regardless of its agenda — and there’s nothing wrong with a documentary having one — Little Empty Boxes gets its message across in a less direct manner than a lot of films, and that’s a good thing. It’s not so understated as to enter subliminal propaganda territory, and it’s not so overbearing that it makes the surrounding story seem trivial in relation to the big picture, which is how different parts of docs like Food, Inc. 2 wind up compared to the issues they illustrate. There is never any indication that Lugavere is exploiting his mother’s story for the sake of the cause, and not just because she surely inspired the cause in the first place. The film treats Kathy with great respect, dignity, and love even while Lugavere is hardly depicted as a particularly tender or emotional person through his own lens. Even if you don’t come away changing your diet as a result of watching the documentary, you’re affected by her, and if you do come away feeling informed or changed, it will be because of that.
Little Empty Boxes opens in New York City on April 19 and then in Los Angeles on April 26.