A troubled 15-year-old boy attempting to cope with the recent death of his mother sets out to research Dr. Max Gerson's claims of a diet that can cure cancer as his first assignment for home-schooling in this documentary from filmmaker Steve Kroschel (Avalanche, Dying to Have Known). Garrett is a boy who has always been close to nature. He lives on a reserve with a menagerie of orphaned animals, and over the years he's become especially sensitive to the nutritional needs of the diet-sensitive
animals he's charged with caring for. When Garrett's mother suffers a tragic and untimely death, the boy falls into a dangerous downward spiral and nearly flunks out of school. Increasingly concerned for Garrett's well-being and determined to strengthen their bond despite the many challenges on the horizon, his father makes the decision to begin home-schooling the distressed teen. Garrett's first assignment: study a controversial book written by Dr. Max Gerson, a physician who claims to have discovered a diet that's capable of curing cancer. Is Dr. Gerson's therapy truly the legitimate, alternative cure it appears to be? In order to find out the truth behind this long-suppressed treatment, Garrett interviews not only Dr. Gerson's family members, but various doctors, skeptics, and cancer patients as well. His studies completed and his findings revelatory, Garrett now sets out to tell the entire world about The Gerson Miracle. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
While docu's claims and criticism yield nothing especially new, the form of their exposition seems singularly ingenious, stylistically falling somewhere between a 1950s educational film and some sort of Norman Rockwellian infomercial.
Kroschel positions The Beautiful Truth as a sort of instructional video for young people on the merits of eating healthy, but its creepy messianic vibe is far more toxic than all the pollutants in all the processed food you could ever consume.
A powerful documentary that offers both a chilling expose of the toxins in our food that are causing so much disease and an affirmation of a plant-oriented therapy that has cured cancer in many individuals.
The director's suggestion that big pharmaceutical companies have no interest in actually curing cancer is credible, but the film itself unfortunately makes Kroschel's beliefs come off like just so much hippie propaganda.
The end result not only constitutes an uncomfortable--dare I say, inorganic--collusion of fact and fiction but also suggests we're being indoctrinated into a cult.
Amazing movie. The information that the Alaskan teenager discovered is simply mind blowing. The movie also shows how certain corporations do not care about people.
June 5, 2010
The Ghostwalker
If you enjoy Documentary type films, then this is a must see. Overlooking it's flaws to the simple points trying to be conveyed in the film, it is food for thought.
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