REVIEW: ‘Sam Now’ Is An Award-Worthy Portrait Of Family Over 25 Years

I am obsessed with Sam Now, a documentary by Reed Harkness that takes 25 years’ worth of film and 25 years’ worth of family drama and compresses it into less than an hour and a half’s worth of examining childhood trauma, brotherhood, parenthood, and the burdens of them all a family overcomes, each in their own ways and in their own time. When Sam Harkness, Reed’s half-brother, was a kid, his mother disappeared without a trace. Three years later, Reed and Sam decide to find her.

You think, as it beings, that Sam Now is going to be entirely about the brothers’ quest to find Sam’s mom. But in reality, that’s only the initial motivation vehicle for what becomes a much, much farther-reaching exploration of their lives and their relationship. From a young age, Reed had a camera glued to his hands, and he and Sam made annual movies together “Sam One,” “Sam Two,” and so forth. The documentary expertly weaves together footage from these movies, other home video recordings, dramatization, and more recent footage to fill in the full picture of what the boys experience throughout the narrative Reed gives to the film.

Sam’s mother abandoned him, his brother, and the boys’ shared father out of the blue when they were kids, and it had a profoundly different impact on everybody. The film starts out as an adventurous journey to track her down after Reed, who is obsessed with why Sam never has wondered what happened to her, suggests they do so. Reed takes on a very active role in the investigation and exploration of Sam’s feelings throughout the journey in a very big-brotherly way. This makes his narrative distance in the film itself all the more interesting, especially as Reed comes to realize where his role in this journey may have gone right and where it may have gone wrong along the way. It’s a kind of self-reflection over the course of 25 years that I’m not sure most films shot over this length of time are often capable of. And it’s kept all the more powerful for how it manages to keep positive, inquisitive, and joyful the entire way through, no matter what, highlighted by the abiding love between these two siblings.

Recent noteworthy entries in the life-long documentary project genre have suffered, in my eye, from being unable or unwilling to adapt to changes in the filmmaker’s perspective and skill over time. They feel like they start off in one direction and must see that path through, even if lessons learned and filmmaking skills gained along the way could have created different and more compelling outcomes. With Sam Now, the entire movie is based quietly around this kind of growth as a filmmaker. Rather than being stuck in the starting position of two brothers on a singular quest, halfway through the movie, the direction of the movie is forced to change on account of what they uncover and how the two, and their whole families, respond to that over the next many years of their lives.

I cannot praise enough the self-awareness the second half of the film brings, especially the closer to the end it gets. And through this self-reflection, a picture of an imperfect but striving family is portrayed quite clearly and without the burden of unresolved trauma, anger, or a specific end goal in mind. Its ultimate message, far enough from the original concrete to surprise you but close enough to feel like it was meant to be all along, is bound to make anybody with similarly confounding feelings about their relationship to family in the past, present, and future think twice about whether they’re proceeding through those relationships as fully and healthily as they ought to be.

I’m ready to declare Sam Now an award-worthy documentary. It’s hugely compelling and incredibly conceived, created, and thought through piece decades in the making that is self-aware enough to have grown and evolved with its subjects over that entire time, even if the motivations changed over all of that time.

Sam Now is playing now in select theaters.