Over the past 25 years, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary photography and film projects have explored youth culture, gender, body image, and affluence. In this fascinating meld of career retrospective and film essay, Greenfield offers a meditation on her extensive body of work, structuring it through the lens of materialism and its increasing sway on culture and society in America and throughout the world. Underscoring the ever-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots, her portraits reveal a focus on cultivating image over substance, where subjects unable to attain actual wealth instead settle for its trappings, no matter their ability to pay for it.
The degree of difficulty here is off the charts, and the wildly uneven results only make the achievement of Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson all the more impressive.
But as in so much of this sprawling meditation-an odd mix where the heinously crass often outweighs the authentically beautiful-deep analysis is lacking.
Greenfield's titillating survey of America's grossest obsessions, from plastic surgery to porn, only flirts with economic and social context, mainly limiting itself to observation and personalization.
"Generation Wealth" feels like it's all over the place, and that, if most of its subjects are lacking in depth, the movie itself is open to the same criticism.
The film is not so much a documentary about how greed and money are destroying society as it is an autobiographical look at Greenfield's obsession with the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.
