'One: The Movie'

What the bleep

ONE MORNING IN 2002, Ward M. Powers, middle-aged trial lawyer and suburban dad, suddenly came up with the idea of making a film on the meaning of life and how we are all really one. So he rounded up his cousin and best friend, and the three novices roamed the country, encountering people on the street and famous spiritual authorities (including Deepak Chopra, Father Thomas Keating, Ram Dass, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Robert Thurman – the first American-born Buddhist monk, and, more important, Uma's daddy), all of whom were asked a list of 20 questions, such as: What is the meaning of life? What happens to you after you die? What is heaven? (Some of these were actually requests, including my personal favorite: "Nonverbally, by motion, gesture, or movement only, show or act out the condition of the world." Various responses included hiding behind chairs, self-strangulation, grimacing with thumbs down, and beating oneself over the head with slippers.) Powers's approach isn't much of an advance beyond the cabbie who had Bertrand Russell in the back and inquired, "So, Bertie ... you're a philosopher – what's it all about?" One is a perfectly ghastly example of New Age flapdoodle: True profundity rarely arrives in sound bites, and expressing Big Ideas through talking-head parades and short-attention-span editing guarantees shallow talk. Though it pretends to be a spiritual smorgasbord, One is really a monster fortune cookie, stuffed with platitudes, flimflam, and the bloody obvious. (Ihsan Amanatullah)