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Everyone’s a main character in “Too Much Sugar,” a scrappy, agitated, spikily entertaining study of an extended family with a whole community’s worth of backstory, present-tense drama and diverging plans for the future.
Only one person in it, however, has main character syndrome. That would be Ryan “Holli-wood” Hollinger, a self-styled patriarch with six children by five women, whose seemingly self-chosen nickname says much about how he perceives his place in the world — relative, at least, to the modest hand that life has dealt him as a former amateur MMA fighter and sometime carpenter in small-town Missouri. To a point, Robert Greene’s quicksilver new documentary indulges that perception, making Ryan the star performer of a roving cinematic tour through his life and loves — until others in his shadow seize the spotlight for themselves.
And it’s there that “Too Much Sugar,” already interesting, becomes compelling, as Greene’s design for the film — a conceit that extends his ongoing fascination with performance and artifice in nonfiction cinema — slowly begins, without malice or subterfuge, to subvert Ryan’s. What begins, in his words, as an intended film “about fatherhood” turns into something less bullish and celebratory, as various people in his paternal orbit offer contrasting views on his presence, or absence, in their lives.
As Greene gives each participant liberty to make a short film of their choosing, and edits the results into a single spiraling, shape-shifting family portrait, “Too Much Sugar” becomes about many things besides fatherhood — among them grief, trauma, healing and liberation. With an unexpected angle of hard-won uplift, the film will likely be a crowdpleaser on the docfest circuit following its premiere in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar: In distribution terms, it’s the kind of singular conversation piece that could attract equal interest from boutique theatrical distributors and larger streamers.
Relentlessly chippy and self-aggrandizing, given to either shouting motivational slogans like “Don’t wait to be great” or wearing them brashly on T-shirts, Ryan is a tough protagonist to warm to. Greene admits as much in his voiceover at the outset, explaining how he first met Ryan at a middle-school basketball game in Moberly, Missouri, and took an immediate dislike to his loud, invasive courtside-coaching style. Two years later, Greene says, their sons were on the same basketball team, and that loathing turned to love. Minus any personal attachment, audiences may struggle to get there, but either way, he’s a forceful, charismatic figure who fills a room — a docmaker’s dream, certainly, but a challenging personality to grow up under.
“Is my dad a narcissist?” asks one of his sons, 23-year-old Gavin, as he states his concern about Greene’s whole project — that it’s going to “validate” his father. His perception of Ryan is echoed, albeit often less directly worded, by most of his siblings, who include 25-year-old pro fighter Tray, teens Wayde and Hank, and therapy-fixated 12-year-old Bonnie. Chosen family, meanwhile, extends to Ryan’s best friend Michael, still numb with grief over the fatal shooting of his teenage son in a gang-related incident, and Michael’s smart, stoic younger daughter Auveon, who has a firm bond with the sensitive, imaginative Wayde. Holding this ragtag clan together is Amanda, Ryan’s on-off partner of 18 years, though biologically, she is mother to none of his children. A quiet, sidelined presence at first, she gradually becomes the doc’s most vital and sympathetic character — increasingly and defiantly vocal about Ryan’s history of infidelity and neglect.
These counter-narratives emerge through the films that Greene enables his subjects to shoot themselves: resourceful shoestring productions that run the gamut from vérité self-portraiture to horror pastiche to mob thriller to elaborately plotted farce, as determined by the personalities and preoccupations of the people making them. The doc gives ample space to these movies-within-the-movie, letting them speak for themselves rather than placing them in condescending quote marks. We learn as much about each person from how they place and wield a camera as we do from the kinetically wandering cinematography by Greene’s DP Robert Kolodny, though the director’s authorial presence is deliberately diminished as “Too Much Sugar” becomes a progressively more communal effort. In addition to Ryan and his family, Greene’s students in documentary journalism at the University of Missouri contributed significantly to the production; the filmmaker’s son Wilkie composed the suitably changeable, see-sawing score.
Ryan, meanwhile, learns his own lesson in collaboration and compromise, as he’s forced to acknowledge perspectives he’s previously ignored in his decidedly alpha vision of fatherly identity. As much as the film encourages its subjects to write and shoot their lives as they will, the most exhilarating developments in “Too Much Sugar” are finally unscripted ones, as the structure of Ryan’s family changes in ways he cannot anticipate or direct. Something new even from this reliably restless filmmaker, Greene’s latest is as lively and pugnacious as the man it initially scrutinizes, though with a significant jump on him in humility and human interest.
