Commune

This movie did a good job of illustrating a particular place and time in American history.

A bunch of hippies beg some money from some Hollywood types, including apparently James Coburn, and go off to Northern California to begin their alternative lifestyle utopia.

The first winter is harsh and tests them. The reality of hard work sets in. The reality of relationships and kids sets in, and yet they try to stick to their principles of free love, no possessions, and anti-establishment living.

It's easy to make fun of these folks now, but as Peter Coyote says, you can't imagine that kind of idealism that people had back then, that they could create a whole new society. They were trying something new and experimental.

It's fun to watch them try, and sometimes fail. The women begin to emerge out of the show of the men and take some control over the ranch. The reality of raising kids with no schools, and without one committed partner often falls by the wayside. The kid rebels by getting a crew cut. Adults rebel by only sleeping with one partner.

It is, as another reviewer pointed out, a portrait of a time when people thought that anything was possible, and tried to create a new society. That they ultimately may not have succeeded is less important than the journey they took.

This is a sympathetic portrait of the Black Bear commune, and you'll come away thinking that the founding members were incredibly lucky--not so much for living the free love communal lifestyle as for not being injured in the mix of idealistic self-absorption and do-it-yourself medical treatments (including midwifery) that characterized life there.

It's clear from the affection with which the founding members talk of each other that it was overall a great time for them, and there's obviously a strong bond that unites them still. Some left the commune to form nuclear families, get jobs, and educate their children.

What's frightening, though, is the stunning level of self-absorption that makes a few of the members fail to think at all about how these principles affected their children. "We were like our own tribe," recalls one boy (Aaron Marley), who ran through the trails and woods with the other kids and later got a crew cut to rebel. I guess there are no snakes or poison oak in the California woods. He later is handed off to a foster family in the commune when his mother went off to paint and find herself; when he wanted to live with a Native American woman nearby, his mother came back, called on his father (who was elsewhere), made a big stink, and got him back on the commune--though not, apparently, with her. So much for the "children have choices" idea.

In another story, though, a child is given a choice, and it's scary. Tesilya's story is the most frightening, and it's a good thing that she tells it so that the audience can see that she's alive and thriving as an editor today. The Shiva Lila cult, which supposedly "worships children," comes to the commune and starts to take it over. When the commune members drive them away, Tesilya is asked to choose and decides to go with her mother. She's FIVE! What would you do? As the cult wanders to the Philippines and India, working all the time on its stated mission of breaking parental bonds, her mother drifts away at some point and Tesilya's left with a bunch of other children, many of whom die of diphtheria (freedom from DPT shots must have been part of the freedoms of the commune). Eventually the cult makes its way to Oregon, and by chance she meets up with some of the Black Bear commune people, who welcome her with "We have been waiting for you. Where have you been?" Uh, she's maybe 10 at this point? (The film doesn't say.) "Glad to have you join us, or whatever." She obviously gets an education somehow, but as Aaron, the boy who later becomes a biochemist, says, "We (children) were pretty much lab rats for the adults" and their ideals.

One of the former cult members is quoted as saying something like "Wanting to save the world can be a huge ego trip." This film presents it all--the love and the self-absorption and the ego-tripping--and lets you make up your own mind.

The comments for Commune make it sound like a very interesting film, one that I would be deeply interested in. Unfortunately, the producers didn't see fit to include closed captions for the hearing impaired and deaf. That leaves me and countless others like me, who depend on closed captions to follow a movie, completely out.

This is inexcusable for any film produced in the year 2005. In a world where all manner of handicaps and disabilities are accommodated, it's infuriating and ironic that the ever sanctimonious entertainment industry fails to demand that all productions and movie theaters be closed captioned.

I am not a hippie, but I have a keen interest in the concepts of the 60s and what works and what doesn't. One of the 60s concepts was the commune, where like minded people could live completely "Free", albeit in a very primitive state. It's almost like a living experiment to discover why modern civilization was invented, as in government, marriage, medicine, agriculture etc. There is a reason why we don't live that way any more, because it sucks! Many of the stories are heart breaking, especially the children who are asked to make very adult decisions at very young ages. As much as these people tried, you cannot escape discipline, responsibility and deligence.

I just watched this documentary and found it to be against what I consider to be right living. Basically, all the people were/are lost. They really hadn't found a thing except the great need for boundaries within all areas of life.

Real freedom MUST be coupled with virtue and it is not virtuous to have intercourse with whomever or to allow one's child to go and do as he/she pleases, even to leave the family for far off lands with strangers.

These people found no absolute truths. They live(d) without accountability to God, refuse(d) His ways --if they knew them at all, were without a moral standard, knew nothing of real love which includes a desire to depart from sin, and entirely void of the concept of eternity.

There is a way that seems right to a man but the end thereof is the way of death. Pleasure that is the broadest doorway into a separation from God.