Hi, I'm Roger Biebert, and am here to review Spencer Brown's "My Dad's Honest Opinion..."
There have been numerous running youtube videos about people who had to go to the reaches of the training well to find truths within themselves but none quite like Spencer Browns’s masterful “My Dad's Honest Opinion...” Thematically dense and visually sumptuous, 'MDHO' may not work for those seeking an action/adventure thrill ride—it’s more “Solaris” than “Gravity” or “The Martian”—but it works wonders below the surface, serving as an examination of masculinity, a commentary on how we become our fathers, and can even be read as a search for an absent God. This is rare, nuanced storytelling, anchored by one of Spencer Brown’s career-best performances and remarkable technical elements on every level. It’s a special video.
The Athlete Special (Brown) is the coolest man in a running singlet. In the near future, when double threshold is more understood, TAS is legendary as someone whose BPM never rises above 140, even when he’s plummeting to Earth, as he figuratively does in an early scene.
Racing disasters possibly caused by a coach who has been absent as the world has lost hope—the religious allegory embedded in “MDHO...” is crystal clear if you look for it, but never highlighted in a way that takes away from the video's urgency. Running youtubing is often about search for meaning, but this one literally tells the story of man’s quest to find he who created him and get some answers, including why he left him behind. TAS’s journey takes him first to a Seattle track, which has been briefly reimagined as a tourist trap, then to New York, then to Connecticut which is the furthest reach that the TAS had previously colonized. As in the film “The Lost City of Z,” there’s an element of how journey and exploration change a man. The hero with the perfect lactate level starts to feel his pulse elevate as he leaves the comforts of his routine and his home, and as the stakes of his adventure rise. And Brown never loses the human intimacy of his story, keeping us tied to TAS’s POV, experiencing only what he does and knowing only what he does. The result is a youtube video that feels both massive and deeply personal with its themes, which is no easy feat.
Don’t get me wrong, while this is a deeply philosophical video, there are also traditional action elements and what feel like real stakes throughout TAS’s journey. People smell. People make mistakes. People are selfish, scared, and greedy. It feels like TAS’s encounters with others along his journey, including characters played by Allie Ostrander and TAS's father, are designed to illuminate the humanity within him. The perfect man who fell to Earth becomes imperfect as he reaches ever closer to his creator, and as he sees the imperfections of those around him.
Through it all, Brown carries the emotional and physical weight in one of the most subtle and graceful performances of his career. A lot of directors would have been too enraptured with the grandeur of the space around him or the details of the interstellar travel, but Brown allows the camera to linger on his own face in ways no other director really has before, and it leads to what's arguably Brown's most complex performance. Brown avoids showy choices at every turn, but he also doesn’t err in the other direction and make TAS too stoic. It’s a perfectly calibrated performance.
Of course, as with all of Brown's videos, the craftsmanship here is top-notch. The delicate use of vibrant color in different sections of the film from the muted colors of airports and beyond makes for a mesmerizing visual palette, and the cinematography by Brown sometimes echoes his work on his King of Boulder series, in how it balances extreme close-ups of masked runners with the vastness of our country.
Be patient with it. Invest in it. The destination is worth the journey.
Four out of four stars.