Enlighten Up! – Review
Consider me not one of the 16.5 million Americans that practice yoga. I never saw the reason to stretch, fold, and conform into a bizarre labyrinth of impossible positions that weren’t from the Karma Sutra. I am personally all for peace and gaining a calmness within myself, but seeing these half-baked New Age type of people with their attempts at understanding the world, one’s self, and God, just doesn’t do anything for me. That’s why, someone like this film’s lead, Nick Rosen, is perfect for such a person like myself (and I know I’m not alone).
Filmmaker Kate Churchill had an idea: take a seemingly normal man, one that is open to the possibilities of what yoga could bring to himself, and send him on a journey spanning 6 months. It’s a great scenario for a documentary, one we’ve seen numerous times, but the film’s real power isn’t this structure and the attempt to organize Nick into enlightenment, but the real discussion of yoga and finally its meaning. The film follows Nick into a variety of different practices of yoga, with the hope that he finds one that will bring him spiritual peace and, fingers crossed, enlightenment. The thing with yoga is that it is so commercial, a multi-billion dollar industry, here in the states, that most of the first part of the film seems like a kaleidoscope of business ideas. We even get a brief, hilarious segment with former WWE/WCW wrestler Diamond Dallas Page and his methods.
When Churchill takes Nick to India, things turn for us and Nick. He has a willingness to learn and understand, but his constant reaffirmation that he isn’t spiritual or religious, is very important to the film. Churchill makes it clear within minutes that she’s been practicing yoga for over 7 years, and that’s fine, but we the audience needed Nick, so it was either brilliance in finding him or pure luck, but Enlighten Up! needed someone like Nick to make some sort of sense of all of the religious and philosophical babble.
His encounters with some gurus, especially Norman Allen and Gurusharananda, are the films absolute heart and soul. God gets tossed around a lot to yogis. Practice this or that, could enlighten you to God. Nick’s skepticism really counter-balances these seemingly off-the-cuff remarks. It’s one thing to say, but it is another to do. Nick is probably more like most modern Americans under the age of 35 now days; he’s open-minded, but cautious, and not really religious, but not opposed to a belief system. This is a perfect notion for coming into this world, and once he talks to Gurusharananda, everything comes full circle. Nick is skeptic, Churchill the director is a believer in yoga, and they clash, which is an interesting by product of what she was trying to do. It might be a light-hearted journey into the world of yoga, but in the end, Nick and Churchill find some sort of resolution, through themselves in ideas presented to them through this journey. Enlighten Up! is a peaceful film, but it won’t change your perspective, a key reason to this film’s success. If anything, it presents ideas worthy of self-reflect, and is a great primer course for the only real quest in yoga: the journey.
Rating: 
