Yahoo News ‘Confessions of a Good Samaritan’ Review: A Documentary Filmmaker Donates a Kidney to a Stranger in This Fascinating Study of Altruism
We often talk about how the internet has revealed our infinite capacity for cruelty; less discussed is how it’s shown us the limits of our goodness along the way. The human brain evolved in a way that compels us to care about the other people in our villages and tribes for our own survival, but modern technology has transformed the entire planet into an interconnected world town faster than our physiology could ever hope to keep up.
While our hearts might be able to bleed for billions of strangers at a time, our heads are often preoccupied with more local problems, and the 21st century has exacerbated that dissonance to the point that we’re all locked in a near-constant negotiation between empathy and self-concern. You can hardly look at your phone without being confronted by a vast constellation of joy and suffering, as historical atrocities and everyday hardships alike are sandwiched between shitposts, baby photos, and 1,000 Instagram stories from the same Taylor Swift concert — friends practically indistinguishable from strangers. All of it is equally close. All of it is equally far away.
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What does it mean to be a good person when it’s impossible to take action against (or even decry) all of the suffering that’s at our fingertips? How — amid this perpetual maelstrom of things to like, favorite, and urgently need to fix — are we meant to be moral? For starters, you could donate a kidney to someone you’ve never met.
At least, that was the first idea that occurred to documentary filmmaker Penny Lane (“Nuts,” “Hail Satan?”) when she reached a point of relative comfort in her life and decided that she wanted to give back. A charitable person by nature (and she has the scans to back that up), Lane hoped that saving a stranger’s life would help to codify the goodness she felt within her, just as she hoped that making a movie about her experience might inspire other people to follow in her footsteps.
Does that sound a bit like taking virtue signaling to a physical new extreme? Maybe, you cynical asshole, but so what if it does? Deeply and believably uncomfortable being in front of her camera, Lane sprints right up to the elephant in the room and waves it out the front door with a quick “it would still be a good thing to do.” That opening disclaimer was all but required by Lane’s decision to call her very personal cine-memoir “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” but it ultimately proves irrelevant to the rich and thoughtful film that follows; it’s a film that ends in a far more ambivalent place than it starts, and puts much less emphasis on Lane’s moral fiber than it does on the ever-shifting nature of morality itself. Some religious texts might but written in stone, but this eye-opening documentary latches onto some very telling evidence as to how definitions of right and wrong are always in flux — in society, in ourselves, and I suppose out of ourselves as well.
Lane has a well-established knack for finding broad and salient truths in the strangest of places (the Satanic Temple, goat testicles, etc.), and “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” continues that trend by unpacking the recent history of bioethics through the story of the director’s own body. It’s a story that Lane naturally tells in the most personal terms, adopting a casual and hyper-intimate approach that uses her computer diary for narration and allows her to question — and laugh at — herself from start to finish.
Lane’s mind was completely made up about the donation before she began shooting, but as the film goes on you get the sense that she needed to make it in order to process her own decision. Inspired by the virality of early TV news stories about altruistic donation (clips from which help to illustrate how alien the concept was just a few decades ago), Lane hopes this doc will spur the same kind of action for a new age, but that feels like an added and surprisingly complicated bonus — at the end of the day, she made this movie for herself.
Great documentarians seldom operate by any other principle, but when Penny Lane makes a movie for herself, everyone benefits, because her interests lead to fascinating places where few of us would think to travel on our own. The basic data surrounding altruistic donation is sprinkled in here and there (only two percent of organ donations in America go to strangers, while 13 people die every day in this country waiting for a kidney), but Lane isn’t here for an infomercial. She wants to know about the Nazi-loving doctor who pioneered organ transplants in the first place. She’s eager for us to watch in abject horror as a woman on a German game show is forced to pick which of the terminally ill contestants will receive her spare kidney. She’s so curious about the science of selflessness that — in what must be a cinematic first — she gets her own amygdala measured on camera. Spoiler alert: It’s bigger than average, a reveal that challenges the basic pretext of the film’s moral inquiry.
As “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” charts how altruistic adoption went from a radical idea to a common practice (“should it be legal for someone to give a kidney to their sick twin?” evolving into “they’d be a monster not to offer”), Lane finds herself grappling with why organs remain in such tragically short supply. All of the donors she interviews wish, to a repetitive degree, that they had 100 kidneys to give, but millions of Americans — registered organ donors, even — can’t fathom the idea of forfeiting a part of their bodies while they’re still alive. Are their brains just built in a different way? Do they fail to appreciate the profound sense of connection that donating to a stranger might afford someone in a world that’s more isolating than ever before? Or are lofty ideals simply not enough to overcome biological coding so wary of strangers that our bodies would sooner die than accept foreign tissue?
None of these questions have clear answers (Lane’s outsized amygdala is just one piece of an unsolvable puzzle), but the fact that Lane feels less sure about her own stance on things after her surgery than she does before it gives fascinating shape to a rough and ready documentary that acutely reflects the shilly-shallying around its central issue. “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is prone to dither around and coast on its director’s natural enthusiasm, but the film strikes a resonant balance between Lane’s journey and everything that surrounds it.
Her own experience of loneliness — particularly insofar as the donation process crystallizes her lack of a support system beyond the camera crew she clearly loves — echoes the isolation of needing a donation in the first place, and the intimacy she lends to the entire project is only rewarded with the realization that she may have given more of herself away than she expected.
If the emotional dimension of Lane’s experience demands a touch more detail than she’s willing to afford it here, it’s still fascinating to hear the personal conclusions she draws around altruistic donation, in part because they underline how even the best of us is liable to question the abstract essence of their morality. (It should go without saying that Lane’s takeaway is more nuanced and less negative than “giving a kidney to a dying stranger is bad.”) Perhaps, in this ever-changing world, the most consistent marker of “a good person” is someone who never stops trying to embody that role on their own terms.
Grade: B+
“Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is now playing in select theaters in New York and Portland, Oregon. It will expand to California in July.
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