This starts out like a yesteryear HBO production but quickly devolves into something you would see on a daytime true crime network. It's difficult to recommend this to really anyone at all, because it lacks so many of the components that used to make HBO stand out amongst its peers. What you end up with in this documentary has very little to do with what you are pitched in the trailer. This is 30 minutes of mystery regarding the identity of this nameless hiker followed by an hour of several embittered older women fighting with one another over moderator status on Facebook groups.
What is actually alarming about the movie is not the content, but how far people will go to make sure there is no privacy in this world at all. Yes, the subjects of this movie find out who "Mostly Harmless" is at the end, but at a cost. I call these internet sleuths "subjects" because the director clearly deviated paths at some point during this production. What started as a documentary on a dead hiker turned into a lazy character study on several older women who had little to live for other than this story. Thus, the "subjects" of the movie were the women who helped find out who this gentlemen was, while engaging in a virtual slap fight in the process. I am loathe to discuss that part of this film because it gives these women more of an audience than they really deserve. But it's what the director ultimately settled on to stretch this from an hour to an hour and a half. Show or movie. That was the dilemma. He made a movie, which meant filling that thirty minutes. As a show, this could have worked. As a movie, it did not.
Of note, we do learn who "Mostly Harmless" is and we also learn that he has a troubled past and apparently felt he had a troubled future. All signs point to him having starved himself to death as a means to end his own life. This was despite having several apparently meaningful interactions during a year+ hike on the Appalachian trail. Several of the people he interacted with ended up being interviewed for the documentary, but none proved helpful in ascertaining who he was. It was ultimately a DNA study and subsequent pamphleting of his Louisiana town that uncovered his identify.
In the end, this movie begs an important and very sad question. The man in this movie did everything he could to go off the grid and to die, alone and unknown, on his own terms. What he got instead was the exact opposite. Thousands of people rallied together to identify him and then, after his death, several other people claimed he was a terrible person. Of course, those people only came out of the woodwork once the story was known and notoriety was to be had, but even taken as true, one has to wonder what purpose this story served. This gentlemen clearly wanted nothing more than to fade into the abyss. Instead, he got sleuthed by a bunch of people who were more worried about Facebook moderator status than anything else. And then, in death, his entire life was unearthed and made public. That unearthing showed a guy who struggled with mental health for 41 years and sought to end his own life, maybe as penance and maybe as something else. It's truly none of our business, and it pains me to have watched this documentary and realized that my viewership was part of what this man sought to avoid.
This film is certainly "documentary" in nature in the sense that it tells a story. But the story is not what one expects, nor is it anything most people would care about. Had the focus been on "Mostly Harmless" and not on the women who could only be described as absolutely harmful, it could have been good. But, alas, this is the new HBO. And the new HBO is quantity over quality. There is plenty of quantity here, but the quality is not what it once was.
Shame on you HBO for phoning this one in. Perhaps a show would have been better than a movie this time around.
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