Pilgrim’s progress:
The documentary ‘Living Luminaries’ returns by popular demand

LIVING LUMINARIES / ‘The human race is on a suicidal rampage,’ says author Marianne Williamson speaking directly into the camera, although presumably addressing writer/producer Sean Mulvihill, who has cast himself as a spritual seeker in Living Luminaries, a serial-interviewee inquiry into the achievement of peace and happiness in a teetering world.

It’s a clever conceit, and Mulvihill plays the pilgrim inquiring into what the film calls ‘the consciously evolved.’ This A-list includes swamis, shamans, rabbis, ministers, Tibetan monks, street people and best-selling authors like Gary Renard (pictured)(The Disappearance of the Universe), who’ll be in-person to discuss the surprise hit documentary.

The film’s subtitle is ‘on the serious business of happiness,’ and each expert counsels pilgrim Mulvihill through anecdote, metaphor and flat-out assertions. The theme running through all these discourses, some effective and some not, is that happiness comes from within and requires a inner ‘quantum leap’ and usually cutting the human ego down to size. And of course, each speaker–addressing Mulvihill, a kind of picaresque seeker–has his or her own emphasis. A ‘professor of attention mechanics’ says that our inability to concentrate, to focus, might be at the root of human unhappiness and stress–and that we need to learn how to truly listen to others and ourselves.

As Mulvihill makes his sojourn, from office to church to park to garden to talk with the experts, little welcome vignettes pull the rug out from his search, illustrating the difficulty of achieving what he calls ‘be[ing] peaceful within myself.’ ‘God is the electricity, we are the lamp,’ one writer tells him. A street musician, claiming happiness though poverty-stricken, sings his message. A man unjustly imprisoned for 27 years (cleared by a DNA test) tells how he achieved wisdom in the harshest of unfair circumstances, and is, by far, the most moving of the interviews, whose eclecticism is sometimes startling. Several tell him that we ‘need to restructure the pattern of our thinking,’ but none has the power of the ex-prisoner, who is now a social activist with impeccable pragmatic credentials.

As Mulvihill makes his pilgrimage, we see this man, an actor by profession, keeping his face impassive as those he confronts make their cases, usually emphasizing that human suffering is inescapable, and that we must try to understand ‘the meaning’ of such suffering.

Living Luminaires is well worth seeing, although the (edited-down) interviews sometimes make some teachers sound a bit glib and simplistic; others, however, find the right metaphors to compress and dramatize their positions, including proper humility. ‘Don’t believe what I say, and don’t, at first, believe yourself–just consider; don’t leap to belief.’

That’s good advice for movie goers, too. But if there were more films like Living Luminaries and fewer like Smokin’ Aces, the world might automatically be a little better. Thanks to Don Brown and his ‘Ocean Planet Film Festival’ for bringing the pop-doc back for our attention.