Review: Minding the Gap

by Andrew Parker

Shot over the course of twelve years by someone who initially wanted to capture the everyday lives and passions of his skateboarding friends, Bing Liu’s documentary Minding the Gap is a complex and monumental work. Starting off as a look at the bond shared by three young men growing up in the economically depressed town of Rockford, Illinois – where 47% of the population makes minimum wage or less, if they have a job at all – Minding the Gap gradually transforms into something groundbreaking. It’s an unparalleled and uncomparable look at how a stifling environment produces shared, learned behaviours and sometimes inescapable cycles of quiet suffering.

Asian-American Bing and his best friends Zack Mulligan, a white boy with a rather unfortunate moustache, and Keire Johnson, a black man with an unforgettable laugh, have spent most of their days in a manner similar to many American teens and young adults. They hang out, play pranks on each other, drink, smoke weed, and spend a great deal of time finding new places to skate (staying one step ahead of the cops and overzealous security guards in the process). Bing is the de facto cameraperson of the group, capturing the exploits of his buddies in striking detail. But as they get older and revelations about their shared histories start taking shape, Bing becomes more interested at looking at how their dying community and their fractured family lives have begun to shape them as human beings.

It sounds a lot like I’m side-stepping a lot of what makes Minding the Gap an unconventional look at early adulthood, and that’s because to speak directly of the elements that make Liu’s film so unique would be to rob his film of most of its emotional and intellectual power. There will come a point in Minding the Gap where the bond between the friends will become strained and their paths as adults will begin to diverge further apart, not thorough confrontation, but via ideological differences. These bonds are tested through naturally shifting personal goals and specific, drastically life altering events. It spoils nothing to say that Zack’s life is changed forever when his girlfriend, Nina, gives birth to their son, Elliott; or that Keire has quietly been working his way through the ranks at his restaurant gig and now wants to pursue a better future; or that the filmmaker has quietly been looking at the lives of his friends to better understand his own traumatic upbringing.

That last part is most significant because Minding the Gap effortlessly transitions itself from being an observational look at growing up into a more trenchant and captivating look at how abusive behaviour leaves behind life lasting scars. A news report heard in the background of a scene during Minding the Gap states that Rockford has the second highest rate of violent crime for a city of its size in the United States, and over a quarter of those assaults arise from domestic abuse incidents. Bing, Zack, and Keire have all been affected by domestic abuse, but all three process what they’ve been through in different ways. Keire is conflicted when talking about his deceased father, who the young man admits doled out beatings, but was always immediately apologetic about it because “that’s how he was raised.” Zack, whose father was a skate punk that gradually became more and more conservative over time, sees a parent who slaps their kid around when they’ve done wrong as something completely normal. Bing, in the film’s most devastating sequence, asks his mother, Mengyue, directly, on camera to tell him why she ignored the savage beatings he was subjected to at the hands of his stepfather.

Having grown up in a family of little means with an abusive parent might give me a bit of perspective that other critics viewing Minding the Gap might not possess, but Liu’s handling of such a delicate, complex, and emotionally loaded subject is nothing short of an undiluted, raw depiction of the everyday reality for millions of people around the world. Poverty breeds frustration and depression, two potent feelings that are often channeled into unhealthy outlets. The young men in Minding the Gap have skateboarding as a creative and physical outlet, but when the demands of the adult world begin weighing on them more heavily, they’ll have no choice but to learn from, move past, or succumb to the lessons imparted on them by those closest to them. The gap referred to in the title is a wide one, and all three young men (two of whom never completed high school) are in constant danger of falling into it.

While I admittedly have a few nagging questions about how Liu handles a key, transformative moment in the core friendship (in terms of what he knew and when he knew it), the filmmaker’s dedication to his craft and longform storytelling is nothing short of exemplary. For a novice filmmaker who mostly came up like so many other kids making skate videos to pass around among friends, Liu displays a wizened, almost preternatural ability to capture the emotional essence of those around him. I’m sure that Liu was helped in some way by Steve James (Hoop Dreams, the Roger Ebert biopic Life Itself), a legendary documentarian who’s no stranger to sifting through a decade’s worth of footage to get to the heart of the human experience, but there’s no way that Minding the Gap wasn’t made by someone who didn’t know what they were doing the entire time. Liu’s filmmaking chops are patient, non-judgmental, and resoundingly empathetic. He might not have known what he had in the moment, but I hope he knows the power of his final work. In the film’s numerous skateboarding sequences, he also proves to be one hell of a cinematographer, following his friends’ every move and trick on a board of his own with a sort of precision and fluidity that most master camerapeople can’t muster.

Minding the Gap is a documentary that has the power to change lives and open eyes about growing up in America. By the time Liu’s ambiguous, powerful, and not altogether hopeful conclusion rolls around, viewers will have the stories of these three young men, one young woman, and their parents burned into their memories for weeks and months to come. Minding the Gap isn’t just another documentary about healing and hardship, but something far more personal to the people who made it and something far more fruitful and universally relevant to anyone who sees it. It’s the kind of work that comes from honest, unvarnished truthfulness. It’s the kind of film where words rarely do justice, and the conversations that will arise from watching it will be more valuable than a thousand glowing reviews.

Minding the Gap opens at The Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Friday, September 28, 2018.

Check out the trailer for Minding the Gap:

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