Unknown White Male (2005)
Average Rating: 6.5/10
Reviews Counted: 76
Fresh: 56 | Rotten: 20
With a quirky visual style, this documentary follows a story of memory loss and confusion while posing provocative questions about the nature of personality.
Average Rating: 6.6/10
Critic Reviews: 24
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 6
With a quirky visual style, this documentary follows a story of memory loss and confusion while posing provocative questions about the nature of personality.
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Average Rating: 2.7/5
User Ratings: 80,748
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Movie Info
Douglas Bruce was a British expatriate living in New York City who in the early morning hours of July 3, 2003, found himself on a subway train heading toward Coney Island, with no memory of who he was, where he lived, or how he ended up on the subway. Bruce ended up asking a policeman for help, and was checked into the psychiatric ward at Coney Island Hospital. As doctors struggled to find out what had happened to him, he was admitted simply as "unknown white male." In time, a phone number in
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Unknown White Male Trailer & Photos
All Critics (81) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (57) | Rotten (20) | DVD (5)
It doesn't help Bruce's cause that he is seen in archive footage to have been a smug, arrogant fellow; it's tempting to imagine that his memory has abandoned him in exasperation. A case of amnesia as overdue self-discovery, perhaps?
Top CriticGiven that this retrograde memory loss has cleansed Doug Bruce's perceptions and made him an altogether more open and emotional person, Unknown White Male suggests that amnesia could be the ultimate chicken soup for the soul.
In the end, it fails to offer any insight into the philosophical question it poses.
The whole movie feels sorta like a snow job.
Unknown White Male has moments you won't forget, appropriate praise for a documentary about amnesia.
The Unknown White Male that Murray has made asks profound questions. They're just not necessarily the right ones.
Whether the story is true or not does have a bearing on how good you think it is.
I found this unsettling story to be gripping.
Though Unknown White Male gets caught halfway between a mystery and a meditation on memory, it raises just enough questions to make for a provocative documentary.
Doug's story is endlessly fascinating, the sort of thing that leaves you thinking about it for days.
That the fugue-state victim is movie-star handsome doesn't hurt the appeal of the film at all, both from a commercial and empathetic viewpoint.
Unknown White Male picks up where films like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind leave off, examining the larger implications and aftereffects of memory loss instead of primarily employing it (however effectively) as a plot device.
Essentially Nature vs. Nurture: The Movie.
Amnesia has been a staple of movies from time immemorial, but few, if any, of them have cut to the bone the way this modest documentary does.
Another intriguing tale of retrograde memory loss.
A fascinating documentary, which traces the process by which its subject learns about his 'old' self, whilst adjusting to an invigorated everyday existence.
Paints an absorbing, even haunting picture of one life wiped away and a new one begun.
Audience Reviews for Unknown White Male
Super Reviewer
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"Unknown White Male" takes a stab at what makes us who we are but this is a huge topic and all this documentary can do in its relatively short running time is to scratch the surface. Personally, I think we are half the creation of our parents and environment and the other half is what we biologically bring to the table. In short, we will always have our family but our friends we make along the way. And as our lives change; our friends change, too.[/font]
Super Reviewer
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November 16, 2005:
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