Jason Sondhi
Documentary, as a form, is widely acknowledged to be in trouble. An individual review is a poor place for a thought piece; still, briefly, there is a sense that commercial incentives in the streaming marketplace have pushed the medium toward formulaic blandness, and I’ve argued similarly about the institutions that gatekeep awards. When things in visual culture hit a rut, we look to the experimental quality of shorts to lead us.
This context percolated in my mind while watching Jackson Kroopf’s new short, Penny, Here. In truth, this portrait of 95-year-old Penny Vieregge, a decades-long resident of the counterculture mecca of Big Sur, is not terribly experimental. But what struck me as refreshing in its 18-minute runtime was an almost deliberate-seeming rejection of contemporary best practices for a modern profile documentary, and how this anti-optimization strategy in fact fosters what conventional wisdom says it should prevent—a more careful, intent-filled viewing on my part, and a deeper connection and engagement with its story.
As docs continually get faster and slicker, Penny, Here alternatively extols patience and presence. A profile documentary should foreground social proof, justifying to its audience why this subject is worthy of their attention; but despite stories that could carry a more conventional profile—Penny was a musical prodigy, moved through the world of the famous Esalen Institute, and crossed paths with legendary musicians while married to the stage manager of the Monterey Jazz Festival—Kroopf declines to include most of this context. His subject is Penny now. Still, at 95, a spiritual person who continually recites Hafez, the 14th-century Persian poet known as Lisan al-Ghaib, Penny presents as a wise, even oracular figure—certainly she can give some valuable wisdom packaged as soundbites to viewers? Wrong! Penny spends big chunks of the film delighting in what she doesn’t know—whether her piano improvisations are any good, what kind of mother she was, or who even the “real” Penny is.
These choices do ask a lot of the viewer. Penny, Here is a profile without much of an arc, and its languid stretches can be hard to justify on paper. But there’s a lightness to Kroopf’s approach that makes the camera feel less like an instrument of discovery than an unobtrusive presence in Penny’s life. The film doesn’t rush to explain her spirituality or her community, and her uncertainty is more than a charming character detail; it becomes the film’s quiet rebuke to the documentary soundbite. Kroopf trusts that a person can be compelling without distilling a long life into a lesson. In the process, the film takes on the quality of speaking quietly: you risk being drowned out, but those who want to listen lean in.
And Penny is worth leaning in for. Even if she is not a guru, she is batty, sweet, uncertain, yet fully present. She is a deeply spiritual person, and I am not, but she makes me understand the appeal without proselytizing. Kroopf would visit every couple of months and sleep on Penny’s deck, and this sort of long-term commitment is rare in a short profile doc. It also allows a degree of intimacy where profundity need not be chased or manufactured, but can emerge on its own.
Piano improvisations bookend the film; the closing performance is held far longer than the usual rules of pace would seem to allow. Penny improvises, and the film gives her, and us, time to listen. It’s a striking choice, one that asks us to attend without promising a narrative turn or a tidy payoff. Its duration helps the idea of improvisation as a journey toward resolution land with real force. It is an example of Kroopf’s assuredness in his voice, in his process that makes this sublime punctuation moment of the film possible.
There’s a familiar template in the portrait of an extraordinary elderly person. What distinguishes Penny, Here is how little it asks Penny to perform her significance. Kroopf does little that is novel in itself, but his sensitivity and the tonal register he cultivates, which adapts to the spirituality of Penny and Big Sur, is the originality. In a documentary culture that prizes momentum and takeaway, his patience becomes a point of view, earning the deeper attention it asks of us.