A good 50 percent of making an effective documentary is finding the right subject, and in Unknown White Male, director Rupert Murray stumbles onto one of the best. In 2003, Murray's friend Doug Bruce awoke on a New York subway with no memory of who he was or how he had gotten there. Murray's film chronicles nearly two years following Bruce's amnesia, during which time he never recovers any memories from his first 35 years, and has to essentially restart his entire life.
Murray lucks into a wealth of material from even the earliest days of Bruce's amnesia, since Bruce, a former stockbroker who was studying photography at the time of his accident, started keeping a video diary almost immediately. With a mix of inherited and original footage, Murray crafts a remarkably moving and profound film that finds poetry and mystery in the everyday.
Nearly everything Bruce does, from going to the beach to meeting his godson, becomes a transcendent experience. Freed of old emotional baggage, Bruce emerges as a different person, and the way his family and friends react is fascinating, inspirational, sometimes heartbreaking. Seeing Bruce head into the ocean, genuinely wondering if he knows how to swim, is one of the most mind-boggling real-life moments captured in a documentary.
Murray's film is so fantastic, actually, that rumors persist that the entire thing is a hoax. Even the experts Murray interviews testify that Bruce's type of amnesia, in which he loses all personal memories but retains skills and general knowledge, is exceedingly rare. Bruce and everyone else depicted in the film are so articulate and insightful that you do have to wonder if things haven't fallen together just a little too neatly.
Murray makes a concerted effort to fill the film with a visual inventiveness that is sometimes a little too busy and distracting for its own good. For the most part, though, it captures the overwhelming sense of discovering the world for the first time and, in getting inside Bruce's head, allows the audience to experience a little of that wonder for themselves.