Where Can I Watch I Am Not Your Guru
Review: 'Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru' Depicts a Self-Help Prophet
- Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
- Directed by Joe Berlinger
- Documentary
- Not Rated
- 1h 55m
Tony Robbins inhales your pain. Where a lesser person might be exhausted by the hordes of supplicants seeking transformation from one of his annual Date With Destiny seminars, Mr. Robbins only becomes more energized as the six-day event unfolds and the unburdenings pile up.
"I'm addicted to it," he says, referring to his obsession with assisting those in psychological, emotional or spiritual torment. It helps that he looks like the perfect receptacle, his bulked body and colossal head both reassuring and intimidating. (Woe betide anyone in the audience who doesn't have a breakthrough; he'll come looking for you.) He's the Weeble of motivational speakers: Whatever you throw at him, it won't knock him down.
In "Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru," an immersive look at his 2014 seminar in Boca Raton, Fla., so much is lobbed that this almost fawning documentary plays at times like a horror movie. There is something almost vampiric about this public siphoning of hurt, from the self-loathing of a suicidal young man to the devastating anguish of a woman who survived a childhood of sex slavery. Is she on the road to being healed, we wonder, or has she just exchanged one possible cult for another?
"I'm gonna show you what to do to reshape yourself," Mr. Robbins tells the young man, and more than 2,000 pairs of ears prick up. This is what they have come from all over the world, and paid almost $5,000, to learn; and like a carefully honed combination of Elmer Gantry, Dr. Phil and David Copperfield (when Mr. Robbins yanks back the curtain, it's your deepest psychological wound that's revealed), their host will not disappoint.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the film's director, Joe Berlinger, who attended the seminar in 2012 and, according to the publicity notes, wanted to share that "life-changing" experience. To do so, he allowed Mr. Robbins to supply the film's initial financing and gave him the option of canceling at any point before the end of the seminar. (Any footage already shot could be used by Mr. Robbins for coaching.) And though Mr. Berlinger had final cut, it's hard to find a single moment here that would be out of place in a promotional video.
For a director whose previous work — like the magnificent "Paradise Lost" trilogy (1996, 2000 and 2011) — has been more focused on social injustices than on mental swamps, this uncritical hands-off stance is quite a departure. It's also a missed opportunity to analyze his subject's charismatic technique, a galvanic blend of psychoanalysis, EST, primal therapy, meditation and calisthenics that confers a peacocking dominance on the speaker and summons a near-religious devotion from his audience.
If anyone has a complaint, we don't hear it. There are no in-depth interviews with employees or family members and no negative experiences. No film of Mr. Robbins's early seminars is shown, and nothing is revealed about his education or that of his small army of helpers. We alight only briefly on his childhood (the ghost of an abusive mother flits quickly past), and his wife joins a handful of lesser celebrities in admiring his authenticity.
The rest is all hugs, tears and wrenching confessions, set to a meticulously curated soundtrack. Yet the film also dares us to write Mr. Robbins off as a huckster-genius; dipping behind the scenes, it exposes the intensive planning and detailed post-mortems that accompany each daily session. In those moments, we see a man who genuinely seems to care, zeroing in on at-risk souls and following up with money and referrals. But by restricting himself to showing how well Mr. Robbins does his job, Mr. Berlinger mainly reveals how narrowly he has done his own.
"Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru" opens Wednesday at IFC Center in Manhattan; on Friday it begins streaming on Netflix and opens in theaters nationally. It is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes.
Where Can I Watch I Am Not Your Guru
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/movies/tony-robbins-i-am-not-your-guru-review.html