In late October 2013, an innocuous Facebook post about a Make-A-Wish Foundation project in the works in San Francisco went online. At the time it was just a document of a cool event. Nobody could have predicted that it would catch fire on social media in the way that it did. Maybe it was just the fact that it was centered on a kid becoming Batman and fighting classic rogue's gallery villains like Penguin and The Riddler at a time when superhero movies were the dominant summer blockbuster genre. But it felt like something more. When the Make-A-Wish call for volunteers got picked up, it went everywhere, and what was envisioned as a fun, small event began to balloon to uncontrollable proportions.
As someone who grew up in the Bay Area, seeing the "Batkid" story explode all over Twitter was thrilling, as was the possibility of San Francisco turning into Gotham for a day at the height of Batman's resurgent popularity, all in an effort to make a five-year-old leukemia patient's wish come true. But in the aftermath of that crazy day, as other news stories piled up about the cost of the event to the city, the production of a documentary, and a narrative feature film adaptation produced by and starring Julia Roberts, things got a bit hazier, emotionally speaking. Some of the undiluted warmth and fuzziness of the story started to dissipate. Would that documentary, Batkid Begins, be nothing more than a piece of charity agitprop? Or would it soothe the cynics with a salve of easy explanations and positive outcomes?
Director Dana Nachman's recounting of the events leading up to Nov. 15, 2013 is not purposely an 80-minute commercial for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, though it ends up being a rather stupendous one anyway. It's a chronological portrait of one of the most effective charitable campaigns to organically go viral and have a deep societal impact, and it was entirely accidental. The structure of Batkid Begins is essentially a ticking clock from the talks Batkid Miles Scott's family had with Make-A-Wish through to the day of his dream coming true on the streets of San Francisco. And throughout its runtime it shows how the spark of Miles' wish ignited a creativity that spread like wildfire, until it engulfed thousands of people who wanted to play a tangential part in one boy's big day. It is pure, unassailable joy. The fact I'm inclined to say that begrudgingly, and then immediately feel guilty for that reluctance, outs me as a deeply cynical human. But Batkid Begins resists and fights back against cynicism again and again, defeating negativity with fearless optimism at every turn.
The film's three big stars (aside from the titular kid, who's just precious throughout) are Patricia Wilson, the executive director of the Make-A-Wish Foundation for the Bay Area, Eric Johnson (EJ), a software engineer and stunt performer who plays Batman, and Mike Jutan, an engineer at Industrial Light & Magic, whose improvisational wit and whimsy helps expand Miles' wish from a simple day of playing around to the scope that would eventually encompass an entire city. There are sequences of chaotic frenzy, as the Make-A-Wish staff coordinates a ridiculous timetable for the wish, or as the San Francisco Opera frantically hand-sews custom costumes. It's all overwhelming, especially for Miles' family, who just expected a fun day for their rather introverted son, and ended up watching as he put on a costume and assumed a heroic persona, totally unafraid. The film sketches out an outline of every little thread to the event, from the out-of-towners flying to the city in droves, to the city's police chief and Mayor Ed Lee riding the wave of positive press, to the contributions of former Twitter executive Mike De Jesus, whose social media prowess reached millions as he live-tweeted the wish.
If the avalanche of positive sentiment to Miles' story and the widespread social media reach is a piercing light in a sea of depressing news throughout the world, then it's only fair that some small bit of negativity would threaten to assail the Batkid story. That arrives in the form of aggressive local news reporters, desperately attempting to catch up to the digital wave of popularity, threatening to follow the Scotts around the city to get exclusive B-roll footage.
The film only takes a few minutes to rebut the other negative criticisms of the day. The $105,000 the city spent from its convention budget to facilitate the unexpected crowd of people was replenished by a private donor, negating any complaints that taxpayer dollars went to an individual experience. (Never mind the amount the city pays to host and clean up after sports victory parades.) And Wilson herself shuts down the notion that there was an imbalance in what went towards fulfilling Miles' day. "I do 100 percent of the wish requests that come to us," she tells me in an interview. "Every child who qualifies receives a wish. So it's not like there were resources spent on this one child and everybody's ignoring the other children." Every time my mind would see a potential weakness in the story, there would be another person pitching in volunteer hours to make the production value more meaningful to Miles, or cops and pedestrians interacting in the most respectful, peaceful manner, and the rarefied air of it all would take over again.
There's only one moment where the film goes too soft, too saccharine, in trying to leech some greater meaning out of the day. As Miles and EJ climb the steps at AT&T Park in the afternoon, after he's tired but continues his journey anyway out of a feeling of responsibility to save Lou Seal, the Giants' mascot, a voiceover from one of the interviews opines that the ascension represents Miles' battle against cancer. That's a bit treacly for any semi-realist's tastes—but the rest of the film thankfully shies away from making grand proclamations in that vein.
In the wake of Miles' big day, Wilson's chapter responded to the giant spike in visibility by getting even more creative with wishes, fulfilling Sam Tageson's desire to be a San Jose Shark, and helping Tre Grinner become an investment banker, eventually meeting the chairman of Goldman Sachs and speaking with Warren Buffett on CNBC. So not only has the story of Batkid reaped public relations benefits, but it has raised the profile of these kinds of charitable moments, public or private. A cynic might wonder whether these are all genuine, or whether some people are getting involved because of the enormously positive reputation it can garner. But as soon as I catch myself wandering down that path, I remember another dreamy reaction from Batkid Begins, and am powerless to resist.
Batkid Begins isn't Hoop Dreams or The Act of Killing, there's no great social justice gained through sharing this story. It's the cinematic equivalent of Pharrell's "Happy" without any of the repetition to make it annoying. And the filmmaking, while effective, isn't particularly riveting. But again, these feel like cynical barbs meant to derive some kind of negative spin to ward off being infected by a kind of invincible happiness. "I had pressure from others saying, 'You have to fundraise around this,'" says Wilson, but she let Miles' wish unfold organically, which served as the best publicity possible for Make-A-Wish: the believably authentic kind. At a certain point, after constantly trying to poke holes in *Batkid'*s warmth and only being met with more improbable politeness from the film or sensible answers from Wilson, cynicism must admit defeat in the face of unbridled glee.
I'm reminded of the scene in Lily Tomlin's one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe where Trudy the Bag Lady explains to otherworldly visitors the difference between a Campbell's soup can (soup) and Andy Warhol's famous painting of that can (art). While later attending a play, the aliens are so taken aback by the audience, "a group of strangers sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying about the same things," that they finally get the difference: "the play was soup ... the audience ... art." So it is with this documentary. Batkid Begins is soup. The story of Batkid, the perfect confluence of charity, social media, and public good—is art.
