The baby boomer generation is known for nothing if not its own self-regard, so of course members within its ranks will produce documentaries examining themselves.
So, “The Boomer Century: 1946-2046” is pretty much what one might expect, and pretty much what one deserves.
Psychologist Ken Dychtwald hosts, alternately declaring that boomers “transform every stage of life through which we pass” and reminiscing about the coonskin cap he owned as a boy. He states that the qualities that define the generation are idealism, anti-authoritarianism, embracing change and self-empowerment, which seems to be a nice way of saying doing whatever one wants without accepting personal responsibility.
Written by Mark Haòris, “Boomer Century” offers a pop-lite history of the phenomena that shaped the generation born of post-World War II optimism – TV, JFK, Vietnam, the Beatles, drugs and free love, etc. – with occasional sound bites from historians and personalities like Rob Reiner, Tony Snow, Erica Jong, Oliver Stone and Julian Bond.
Perhaps inevitably, given such an unwieldy subject, the film sort of bounces around, from a story about a real-estate executive whose office is a treehouse to a relatively mild-mannered screed by comedian Lewis Black to a portrait of a geezer rock band featuring Snow.
Sprinkled amid bright-eyed speculation of the generation’s future as its members continue to age – we’ll put off retirement and swim with the dolphins – comes some more sobering analysis. “Very few boomers have been responsible savers,” Dychtwald notes. While offering tips on saving for retirement, he allows that the combination of people living longer yet experiencing many medical problems in their later years, coupled with that lack of financial planning, could translate into years, if not decades, of hardship that could affect the entire country.
In keeping with many boomers’ “I’m-OK-You’re-OK” penchant for unreflective navel-gazing, “Boomer Century” glosses over some of the fallout of the “greed is good” generation (narration rather blandly notes, “Rule-breaking can sometimes lead to immoral behavior”). And the film is practically blind to the fact that subsequent generations have followed the boomers, that the culture at large has come to value youth over all else, that even though we’re all living longer, our employers may not want to pay us for our services into our 70s.
That’d be the nightmare scenario for the typical boomer: a prolonged period of irrelevance.
