NoBody’s Perfect Directed by Niko von Glasow
I’m thinking, to cite just one particularly egregious example, of 39 Pounds of Love, Dani Menkin’s coercively “inspirational” 2005 portrait of Ami Ankilewitz, an unbelievably emaciated 34-year-old Israeli quadriplegic born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II, a rare genetic disorder his pediatrician predicted would kill him by the age of six. The narrative takes the form of an unnecessarily protracted—and for Ankilewitz, life-threateningly stressful—road trip across America to confront the blameless medical man with the fact of Ankilewitz’s continued existence. Along the way, Menkin crudely exploits his subject’s spectacular deformity as a found special effect. “Bad” people are shown recoiling from unexpected encounters with a living skeleton; “good” people are shown projecting upon Ankilewetz’s wizened frame saintly attributes of courage, spiritual beauty, and a richness of wisdom unavailable to the able-bodied. It’s about as pure and dreary a cinematic expression of what disability activists call the “gimp mystique” as I’ve ever seen, and if Ankilewitz is ostensibly playing along with Denkin’s tainted agenda, you have to wonder how much latitude this utterly dependent man was given to do otherwise by the smiling, cooing bipeds around him.
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On paper NoBody’s Perfect may not sound especially promising: in a retread of the theme of the 2003 feel-good British comedy Calendar Girls (and the true story behind it), von Glasow enlists his fellow thalidomides—six women and five men—to join him in posing for a calendar of nude photographs. The resulting portraits turn out to be as appealing as they are revealing, but what’s far more crucial to the documentary’s success is what happens along the way. This is fundamentally a film about high-powered conversationalists who happen to share disabilities of a common origin, and unless intelligence and insight are undiagnosed side effects of thalidomide, von Glasow has patently stacked the deck with the best and brightest among the available pool of subjects. Thalidomide opera star Thomas Quasthoff doesn’t make an appearance, but those who do are an almost ridiculously accomplished bunch. Melancholy and introspective Theo Zavelberg is a skilled gardener and arborist, which seems incomprehensible given his truncated arms and gnarled hands—until you see his prehensile manipulation of a cigarette and lighter. Limbless, egg-shaped Stefan Fricke is an astrophysicist. Flipper-armed Fred Dove is a BBC radio host. Legless Kim Morton is a municipal politician in Belfast who spearheaded a successful campaign to extract compensation for thalidomides from the British pharmaceutical firm that licensed the drug from Grünenthal. Armless Bianca Vogel is a world-class dressage rider. And so on.
NoBody’s Perfect isn’t a perfect film: There is, for example, a Michael Moore-ish bit of business involving von Glasow’s halfhearted attempts to confront the wealthy scion of the family that owns the Grünenthal corporation. But if you’re up for spending 84 sugar-free minutes in the company of a dozen thoughtful, funny, and profoundly resourceful grown-ups, this is your doc.
