Enlighten Up!
When it comes to the yoga doc Enlighten Up!, most filmmakers would have chosen one of two journalistic sides: irreverent, Penn & Teller-style debunking or fawning cheerleading. But documentarian Kate Churchill comes at it from an unusual angle. A “believer” who’s practiced the Hindu discipline every day for seven years, she’s also grounded enough to recognize its inherent silliness.
She seeks to navigate between yoga’s many deficits and benefits. Is yoga, a multibillion dollar industry, a scam that sells watered-down Easternness? A buncha New Age twaddle? Genuinely relaxing and therapeutic? Churchill suggests it’s all of the above. And to prove her thesis she recruits one Nick Rosen, a devout but willing skeptic, to spend half a year doing as much yoga as he can stand, and see if he just doesn’t morph into a spouter of impenetrably fuzzy platitudes and meaningless phrases like “spiritual,” “self-actualization” and “enlightenment.”
Enlighten Up! does a bit of Bullshit-style investigating in its early stretch. Yoga-ers claim their activity is anywhere from 2,000 to 40,000 (!!) years old. Churchill finds someone who states the yoga performed today is a reinvention done in the late 19th century, while the wise yogi of paintings and tea boxes was not too long ago considered a malevolent and destructive boogeyman.
But Churchill is mostly interested in the tension between documentarian and subject. Rosen proves open-minded and game, but he fails continually to go gung-ho. He allows his sweaty body to be stretched in ungodly positions, engages in sincere chats with teachers and gurus, but comes away from each encounter with nothing more than a secular appreciation.
Increasingly aggravated, Churchill shleps him to yoga classes—from teachers like former pro-wrestler Dallas Page to a cool and profane dude in Hawaii. Finally, she throws her hands up and treks out to pretty India, where the scenery and less Baskin Robbins-style yoga causes a mild breakthrough that Churchill has to consider a success.
Despite being a guiding hand, Enlighten Up! really hews to Rosen’s perspective, and he makes a more curious host than, say, Bill Maher. His reactions are far more probing and interesting than his director’s, whose impatience and frustration with her star comes off as childish and banal. Don’t be surprised if you wish Rosen had just kicked Churchill off the project and directed himself. B-
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