Unbreak­able: The Mark Pol­lock Story

Irish box office doc­u­men­tary hit Unbreak­able: The Mark Pol­lock Sto­ry treats its sub­ject with such idol­i­sa­tion that it seems like a hagiog­ra­phy or saint’s life, rather than an objec­tive biog­ra­phy or human inter­est sto­ry. After los­ing his vision as a child, Mark Pol­lock went on to become the first blind man to com­plete the Amund­sen Omega 3 South Pole Race.

Pol­lock suf­fered fur­ther mis­for­tune in 2010 when, after falling from a win­dow, he was diag­nosed as para­plegic. Yet some­how he makes the best of the worst. He remains com­mit­ted to regain­ing the use of his legs, and has been involved in med­ical research, test­ing new spinal injury treat­ments. Through­out the film, direc­tor Ross Whitak­er uses shots tak­en from cars, planes and sleds in tran­sit as a recur­ring motif, giv­ing the impres­sion of Pollock’s surge across the earth despite his disabilities.

Faced with such solemn sub­ject mat­ter, it can some­times feel as though dis­lik­ing the film is some­how not allowed. And yet Whitak­er exploits gener­ic heart­string tug­ging con­ven­tions to an almost par­o­d­ic degree. He plays emo­tive music exces­sive­ly, has rel­a­tives recount upset­ting sto­ries until they are vis­i­bly dis­tressed, and fla­grant­ly milks as much per­son­al tragedy as he can from recy­cling old pho­tos and home videos. This over-reliance on cliché can feel like a lazy, if not cyn­i­cal, way of try­ing to make you more upset by Pollock’s ordeal. One could argue that this should make you more uplift­ed by his resilient atti­tude, but instead the film feels abstract­ed, like a chrono­log­i­cal list of someone’s mis­for­tunes and life achievements.

It’s true that these kind of endurance sto­ries often appeal to our emo­tion­al rather than crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties. As one rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Christo­pher Reeve Foun­da­tion tells Pol­lock dur­ing the film: ​“The best fundrais­ing real­ly is sto­ry­telling.” With this in mind, it’s easy to see why the film was so suc­cess­ful in the Irish Box Office last year. Pol­lock is clear­ly an inspi­ra­tional fig­ure – like an Alex­ey Stakhanov, or a Helen Keller – and it is worth not­ing he is con­sid­ered a celebri­ty across Ire­land. (The film is crammed with more TV and radio inter­views than it knows what to do with.) It’s is the sort of sto­ry which, con­densed into a ten-minute video, might eas­i­ly achieve near-instant viral­i­ty. Yet as a fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary it can become arduous.