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The idea of Eric Steele's documentary, The Bridge, intrigued me when I first heard it: exploring the reasons why so many people choose to end their lives by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently, it's a very popular location for people to make this decision, and jumping is a mostly surefire way to die. Steele attempts to understand the appeal of the bridge, as well as the reasons behind the suicide decisions of the people he features, and fills the screen with images of the bridge and interviews of the jumpers' loved ones. Unfortunately, while the idea was appealing, the execution wasn't quite what I expected.

For me, the opening scene was enough to doubt my decision to watch this movie. It does, in fact, contain images of actual suicides. The sight of a person who has decided life is no longer worth living plunging into the depths of the bay is something I wasn't able to watch without crying. I thought the movie was going to be mostly interviews, so the shock was significant to me.

There were many debates when the movie came out about whether or not it was ethical for Steele to film these suicides. The jumps were in public, but one wonders if that makes it justifiable to record them and publicly distribute them, even if the victim's families have given their consent. I don't want to get into the debate personally, but my own take is that I don't like to watch people actually die. That's why I go to movies and read books. When it's real, it's much harder for me to handle.

The movie definitely has its strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths would be the artfulness and tastefulness with which the subject is approached. The images of the bridge, especially in the fog or at night, evoke an aura of mysteriousness to something that I've never thought of as anything other than a giant driving connector from point A to point B. The interviews with the families are usually in the comfort of their own homes, freely given, and sincere.

One weakness for me was that those interviews also appeared very detached from sentiment. This may have been a conscious editing decision, but to hear people speak so frankly about the behaviors of their loved ones was a bit jarring. Since the whole movie was filled with the stories of individual jumpers, it seemed awkward that their stories weren't easy to connect with emotionally.

Also, the pacing is sluggish. Most of the movie is framed with the story of one particular jumper, named Gene. The interviews with his friends were interspersed between all of the other stories, and the movie ends with Gene's dramatic drop from the bridge. Gene spent so long thinking on the bridge before he jumped that I felt like the movie makers could have intervened somehow, and the movie makers spent so long dragging out Gene's story that the movie seemed to lag. It almost felt like there wasn't enough content to fill the time, and seeing his story drawn out so much practically makes the audience anticipate his death, which is a very unwelcome idea.

In the end, my take on The Bridge was that it was successful in exposing the Golden Gate as a mysterious magnet to people considering suicide. It tries to understand reasons why the people chose to die, and reasons why the bridge was the place they chose to do it, but not as effectively as I thought it might have. And with its attempts to remain tastefully unbiased or intrusive, the movie left me feeling detached from the individual stories, but still appalled at having seen a few people die. It just wasn't for me.