Enlighten Up

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ***

For a movie that's so entertaining and even, at times, philosophically rich, it's too bad that Enlighten Up! has a gimmicky premise. Director Kate Churchill, in voiceover, describes her seven years of yoga practice, and wonders whether yoga can transform a person's life in only six months, whether it's possible for a total beginner to achieve a spiritual awakening in that time? (Why six months? Why not a year or more?) Kate herself is conveniently exempt from being a subject, so she sets about finding somebody who has never practiced yoga, so he can explore the subject. She'll just tag along and see what happens.

Luckily for her, the beginner she finds is a young man named Nick Rosen, whose charisma, intelligence, and good looks go a long way towards making you forget, for most of the picture, how forced the premise is. He even comes with interesting inner conflict, which Churchill introduces in an early sequence by contrasting Nick's quite-divorced parents: his father the New York trial lawyer, and his mother the self-described "shamanistic healer" in a Colorado cabin. As you might guess, Nick often wants to believe but he just can't bring himself to; open-minded but skeptical, Nick is usually torn between a desire to seek spiritual development through yoga, and the sense that nothing of the sort is really happening to him, at least because of yoga.

Rosen is a former journalist, and he approaches the project as if he is writing a long story under Churchill's direction, doing a lot of background research, keeping a daily journal of his experiences, and sampling all the various flavors of yoga as found in New York and elsewhere in the US. Ultimately he travels to India to study with the very devoted (he describes the atmosphere around one prominent guru as "cult-like") and is even granted an audience with the most famous guru of them all, B.K.S. Iyengar.

Of the many other gurus he studies with, although most are very appealing, a few are unwelcoming and some are exceptionally kooky. These more eclectic gurus cause the most interesting tension between Kate and Nick. She expected that Nick, as a journalist, would want to see all the same gurus as she would. While largely true, he also insists upon interviewing a former wrestler-turned-guru who makes yoga appealing for other "dudes" by putting well-endowed "babes" in his classes, way up front to improve the view. And then there is the "Laughing Guru," whose appealing but very unrigorous philosophy is: if you make yourself laugh, you raise your spirits and those of the people around you, and what is more spiritual than that?

But, as Nick says after this sequence: "Kate isn't laughing." She worries that her whole project is falling apart because Nick isn't taking it seriously. Soon we see her confessing to the camera, half in tears, that she's just sick of yoga at this point. Nick suggests that Kate should have just done the project on her own. Sensible enough. But Nick was always serious about the project, and he pursues it to the end.

The documentary provides a rich picture of the history and present-day diversity of yoga, and is worth watching for the entertaining way it presents this information. But ultimately the film works not just because it is informative, keeps the story moving along and because of the colorful personalities Nick and Kate encounter during their journey, but because it ends up transcending the gimmick it started with: Nick does actually undergo a personal transformation during his six months of yoga.

How much of that change is due to yoga alone is open to discussion -- it's clear he was due for a life change in any event -- and he doesn't see the change in himself as a spiritual awakening per se. But it's obvious that the experience has affected him profoundly: all those hours of physical focus and meditation have made him more thoughtful and "open-hearted." It's enough to make you want to take up yoga.