The result is a charming, moving, and thought-provoking film that retells the story of the sisters and Lita and everyone else involved as they try to figure out the source of the eerie connections and parallels in their experience, from the presence of familiar paintings on the kitchen walls of Lita’s apartment to the eerie resemblance between Lita and their late sister.
The film is also yet another documentary that is wholly or partially a “meditation on storytelling”—with the expected familiar devices, such as a shot of an empty chair which is then filled by an interviewee who sits silently waiting for the director’s instructions, and “outtake” footage of subjects re-enacting the same moment and being asked by the director not to act so much. Here, though, fortunately, such touches actually have a point besides embracing a now-ubiquitous nonfiction filmmaking cliche: the source of the sisters’ pain is a long and complex narrative they didn’t know anything about until fairly deep into their lives, and that’s predicated on falsehoods that were invented and reinforced by loved ones and strangers alike.
Viewers who’ve seen a lot of documentaries will immediately guess the central revelation, and director Fredriksson knows this and has the good taste not to withhold the obvious to manufacture fake suspense and drag things out. Instead, she gives us the gist of the truth pretty early on and devotes the remainder of the story to a meticulous reconstruction of how such a thing could happen and then be hidden from the people whose lives it most affects. If you believe that coincidences are often the iceberg-dip of cosmic design, or at least the endpoint of a chain reaction of interrelated events, you’ll appreciate the validation “The Gullspång Miracle” will give you.
“Common Ground” is a star-studded, handsomely produced, Hollywood-scaled documentary designed to raise awareness of how industrial farming methods, genetically modified crops, and toxic pesticides have destroyed the carbon content of the very soil that’s supposed to be supplying the world with vegetables, and how America’s major chemical companies and their lobbyists have captured American legislatures to protect their bottom line at the expense of human life.
It’s a position paper with panache, directed by Rebecca and Josh Tickel—whose Netflix documentary “Kiss the Ground” took a different approach to the subject. There are split-screens; “on message” pop songs (Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” plays during a section about, um, respecting the soil); closeups of documents and photos that have been jazzed up with state-of-the-art animation and graphics; and voice-overs by a squad of celebrities who tag-team their way through the script and are introduced getting comfy in the recording studio, as in those old TV specials where the host would briefly pretend they didn’t know they were being filmed, then turn to the camera and say, “Oh, hello—I didn’t see you there!” Laura Dern kicks things off and is replaced by Jason Momoa, who is succeeded by Rosario Dawson, Ian Somerhalder, Woody Harrelson, and Donald Glover. Every narrator leans into the urgency of the assignment, but it should be said that the usually A-game-bringing Momoa looks and sounds as if he drove to the studio at sunup straight from the karaoke bar where he spent eight straight hours performing the entire AC/DC catalog.