Tim Wardle’s documentary starts as a tabloid delight, three strangers with one face, and turns into something that made us angry. It is built like a thriller, which is why it grips and also why it sometimes seems too pleased with its own twists.
In 1980 a nineteen-year-old called Robert Shafran turns up for his first day at a community college in upstate New York and is greeted like an old friend by people he has never met. They call him Eddy. Within days he has met the young man they mistook him for, found that they share a birthday and an adoption agency, and been photographed for the newspapers, where a third young man, David Kellman, sees his own face. Tim Wardle’s documentary gets through this in its first twenty minutes, mostly by letting Shafran and Kellman, now in their fifties, tell it to camera with the grins of men who have told it a thousand times. They are good company. The story does not stop there.
Every review and the poster itself make clear that it darkens, so we will say only that the second half asks why three babies were separated at all, and that the answer is not a comfortable one. Wardle has built the film like a thriller, with information held back and released on a schedule, and for most of its 97 minutes that works. This is a good documentary, brisk and humane, worth your evening. It has two flaws that matter, and we will come to them.
Michael Harte’s editing is the engine. He runs the reunion three times, once from each direction, and each pass adds a detail the last one held back, so the first act has the pull of an anecdote told by someone who knows when to pause. The archive is a gift: three young men in matching jackets and matching hair on daytime television, finishing each other’s sentences while the studio audience loses its mind. Tim Cragg shoots the present-day interviews against dark backgrounds with the brothers framed identically, so you find yourself checking one face against the other, which is the film’s whole subject. The reconstructions of 1980 are amber-lit, actors seen from behind or in pieces, and Dawn Thompson puts them in the wide collars and flared denim of the year without anyone winking.
We laughed at the chat-show footage, as we were meant to. Then came the scene that made us angry. The three families, having found each other, go to the Manhattan agency that placed the boys, Louise Wise Services, and ask why nobody told them. They are given an answer that answers nothing. One of the fathers, going back for a forgotten umbrella, sees the staff through a doorway opening a bottle of champagne. It is told plainly, by people who were there, with no music under it, and it is where the film turns. We sat with it for some time afterwards. Nothing later in the film frightened us as much as that glimpse of relief on the wrong faces.
The journalist Lawrence Wright, who was writing about separated twins long before this story reached him, is brought in to explain what the paperwork points to, and he is clear and careful. Here the flaws show. Paul Saunderson’s score, which has hummed low strings under the interviews from the start, now treats every filing cabinet as a threat, and by the hour mark ordinary sentences are being scored like confessions. The film raises a large question about how much of a person is settled before birth and lets its interviewees dispose of it in a few lines. And there is a third brother. The film uses his story to drive its last act and spends less time on him as a person than on either of the men sitting in front of the camera.
Set beside The Imposter (2012), the other British documentary built as a run of twists, this is the plainer and kinder film, more interested in the people at its centre than in its own cleverness. It is also less careful about the line between what it knows and what it suspects.
Do not look the brothers up beforehand. Wardle has decided the order in which you learn things, and it is a fair order. The poster calls this the most amazing, incredible, remarkable true story ever told. It is not. It is a sad one, told well, with too many violins in it.
