Exploiting Yourself

I think, after seeing this film, you really have a better understanding of the elderly and how great they are, and how much they can teach us.
—Andrew Jenks

“There may be things that go on there that we’re not supposed to see.” This is what therapist Steve Cowan tells Andrew Jenks when he learns his 19-year-old patient means to visit an assisted living facility. Cowan is joking, sort of, and he also cautions Jenks, at the time a film student at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, in a roundabout way: “I’m a little nervous for you,” he smiles, but still, “If you’re exploiting anybody, you’re exploiting yourself.”

Jenks goes anyway, not just to visit a relative, but to see “what old people are really like.” With crew in tow—cameraman Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew and AD William Godel—Jenks takes a room at Harbor Place, near Port St. Lucie, Florida, for a month. Inspired, he says, by the loss of his own grandfather’s to a fast-spreading dementia, Jenks means well. At the start of his documentary, Andrew Jenks, Room 335, he tells himself that he’s not just imposing on the residents, but rather, “I think I’ll fit right in there. I mean, they’re outsiders, they’re outcasts, no one seems to understand them. Sounds like a perfect scenario.” This gives way within a minute or so of screen-time, to the admission that “Obviously I’m a pretty big outsider here.”

Over the course of his film, Jenks comes to see the residents as his new friends, struck by their great intelligence, selflessness, and passion. His admiration and artlessness are evident in his interactions with residents, sometimes as cute montages that offer shorthand characterizations (Tammy’s wise and optimistic, Josie wins at bingo, Libby has a short temper, and Bill is alternately rambunctious and depressed), and at other times, formalish interviews with almost charmingly naïve questions posed. “As a person, are you still learning?” he asks Bill, who looks at him curiously. He asks inveterate smoker Eleanor, “What are your feelings on death?” Before she describes her quadruple bypass surgery, she sighs, “It comes to all people.” Jenks acts his own age when he looks at the camera and asks, conspiratorially, “How do we bring up the sex issue?” He puts the answers together in a bunch, ranging from “It’s so far back, I can’t remember” to “It’s wonderful… when appropriate.”

His increasingly complicated feelings about his subjects emerge in a phone call with a college friend that recalls what happened on a night when a storm takes out a local transformer. He realizes, he says (in a scene that seems just a bit too contrived to showcase his empathy), that he’s starting to like his “friends.” “I feel like I’m getting close to the residents,” he says, voice worried as he appears pacing in the dark. “I feel like anyone could just die at any moment.” Such consciousness is part and parcel of being older than 19, of course, and Jenks’ friends make that clear enough during his conversations with them. “All my friends are dead,” says 96-year-old Tammy, “That’s what happens at the end of this time. I don’t know if it’s a blessing to live this long.”

Andrew’s own fear is illustrated in his efforts to make sure residents are okay. They trundle through the hallways, the lack of visibility inside rooms and clattering on the soundtrack implying his rush and sense of rising panic, that residents might be afraid or their nighttime apparati clicked off. Suddenly, he says the next day, he feels like he wants “to help. I really want to become one of them, you know, I just don’t want to be the kid with the camera.” Jenks’ own feelings are the film’s focus throughout: he is “exploiting himself” in the mode of Michael Moore, taking himself on an adventure through which he means to educate his viewers. For the residents, by contrast, Harbor Place is their future.

Jenks articulates this revelation in the form of a question that’s both rewarding and annoying. “We’re all gonna grow old at some point, but does that mean we’re going to be neglected too?” The neglect he witnesses is not intentional, but institutional. The documentary doesn’t focus in any way on the staff or doctors at Harbor Place; only a couple of these workers even speak on camera. But the American impulse and seeming necessity to put senior citizens “away” plainly worries Jenks. It’s an increasingly familiar story, with elders living longer and adult children wrapped up in their own busy lives, with careers and children, and the industry that has developed to serve a range of needs is now thriving.

Even when they go well, without abuses or scandals, such stories are sad. Residents suggest they don’t want to be a bother to their children, that when older folks have already lived their lives, they should allow their kids the chance to live theirs. The film doesn’t pass judgment on the assumption here—that these lives don’t intersect, by some sort of recently accepted social edict—but it does note the verve and boredom of Harbor Place inhabitants, encouraging you to wonder at the choices that seem so inevitable.