The Beautiful Truth

As last year's "Sicko" proved, if there's any issue ripe for a hard-hitting dissection, it's the business of illness. Unfortunately, writer-director Steve Kroschel is no Michael Moore (OK, few are), and his well-meaning documentary "The Beautiful Truth," which sheds light on the merits of the Gerson therapy, an organic food and juicing regimen designed to fight cancer and other fatal afflictions, comes off mostly like a hybrid of retro-style educational film and late-night infomercial.
Instead of tracking several current cancer patients' start-to-finish experiences with the Gerson therapy -- holistic healing concepts based on eminent German doctor Max Gerson's controversial book "A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases" -- or banging down the doors of the obstructive medical, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, the Alaska-based Kroschel blandly follows his home-schooled teenage son, Garrett, as "the boy" (as he's strangely referred to throughout) crosses America on a kind of junior investigation of Gerson's natural cure.
The teenage son meets with scientists, physicians and the late doctor's elderly daughter and grandson along the way.
Between Kroschel's drippy, grandiose narration, his "inspirational" filmmaking approach and young Garrett's stagy involvement, the whole enterprise, although not unenlightening (the sections linking MSG, aspartame and mercury-laden dental fillings to cancer are especially intriguing), feels too self-serving and prefabricated to have the profound effect its subject matter deserves.
Da The Los Angeles Times, 26 novembre 2008