It’s out on DVD this week — which I don’t yet have a copy of, and likely won’t — but Unknown White Male is still a film with such inherently interesting subject matter that I thought I’d throw up this review, which originally ran in concert with the movie’s limited theatrical release late this February. To wit:

Directed by Rupert Murray, Unknown White Male
tells the remarkable, fascinating and true story of Douglas Bruce, a
30-something New Yorker whose identity has been pieced together and
re-forged, sans a lifetime’s worth of comfortable reference points. On
the evening of July 1, 2003, Bruce chatted with a friend by phone and
made informal plans for dinner. At 7 a.m. the next morning, he snapped
out of a fugue state and found himself alone on a subway headed for
Coney Island. He didn’t know how he’d got there, where he was going or
even who he was. All experiential memory was lost; he was without
identity.

With no wallet or ID card, no sense of what door the
keys in his pocket might unlock, and only the random, sparse contents
of a small backpack on his person, Bruce wandered into a police station
and asked for help. For days he was a medical sideshow attraction — the
confused and panicked, but polite and slightly English-accented fellow
who bore no outside traces of drug abuse, significant physical trauma
or neurological illness.

Multiple MRIs and CAT scans reveal a small pituitary tumor in
Bruce’s brain, but one present probably since birth and in theory
unrelated to memory function. An array of blood tests and all manner of
stringent psychological questioning goes nowhere, and a scrap of paper
with a name and phone number initially yields no clues. Stricken by
retrograde amnesia, there is absolutely nothing to connect
Bruce to anything in the outside world. It’s only when he’s being
committed, and asked to sign a piece of paper, that a flash occurs: his
purely instinctive, chicken-scratch signature clearly begins with the
letter “D.” Still, this leads nowhere fast.

That aforementioned phone number eventually does unlock his past, and
from there Bruce begins a journey through a still inexplicable maze.
There’s a cool detachment to Bruce that’s fascinating to witness. It’s
as if all the accrued baggage of adulthood — the acrimony, the petty
grievances, but also all the shared social fabric that tethers us
together in invisible but tangible ways — has been stripped away,
replaced by a confounding, impassive naiveté. In casting off old
“friends” and habits alike, and retaining or rehabilitating some
elements of his former self, Bruce’s plight presents a parallel
challenge to his family and all those who knew him, for they too must
bury their memories of the man they once recognized.

Director Murray, a longtime friend of Bruce’s, walks us emphatically if not
ardently through Bruce’s quest, cobbling together past video footage,
photographs, recreations, some astonishing footage Bruce himself shot
in the days and weeks after the incident, and, of course, plenty of
interviews. Yet to call Unknown White Male a collage or
pastiche imbues it with a certain handmade quiltedness that the movie
doesn’t really possess or embrace. There’s far less detailed sit-down
sessions with Bruce than one might imagine about the frightened search
for emotional reference points — the panicky mental equivalent, one
imagines, of constantly feeling for furniture in the dark — and as the
movie wears on and Bruce becomes less and less worried about ever
regaining his memory, Murray’s inquisitiveness seems to somewhat mirror
this shrugging nonchalance.

Still, Unknown White Male is a film whose subject matter is
so engrossing that it pulls you along, and there are all sorts of
weird, emotional EKG spikes, as when Bruce wakes up in his old
apartment for the first time and asks the “friend” staying with him
where his mother is. She’s dead, several years on, but in that person
having to relate that to Bruce — and having it subsequently related to
us here — the movie charts and highlights in very affecting fashion
certain basic universalities of human experience that are apparently
engrained in all of us, memory be damned. (Wellspring, unrated, 87 mins.)