Michelle Obama and Dalai Lama Together at Last (OK, Not Really) in Fawning New Docs

By Liam Lacey

Becoming

Rating: B-

The Dalai Lama: Scientist

Rating: C

Two new documentaries this week — the Netflix film Becoming, which follows Michelle Obama on a 34-city book tour for her 2018 best-selling memoir, and The Dalai Lama: Scientist, tracing the Tibet Buddhist leader’s outreach program to Western scientists — are closer to advertorial than documentary.

While informative and competently crafted, they’re more about warm feelings than evaluation.

Director Nadia Hallgren’s Becoming gives us a good impression of hanging out with the First Lady without really getting us past the surface, although we get some sense of her drive. The important thing to know about her, says Obama, is that she was born on the South Side of Chicago,” ergo her background was African-American working class. That means that, long before she faced life in the White House, she’d already handled low expectations from a guidance counsellor and racism at Princeton before she went to Harvard Law School.

What was her family like? Pretty idyllic, apparently. The film takes Michelle, along with her mother, Marian Robinson and older brother Craig, back to the apartment where she was raised, while she reminiscences about her late father.

On the road, we have bookstore appearances, Q&A sessions with fan interviewers Stephen Colbert and Oprah Winfrey and, best of all, visits with students, who often push her for inspirational advice. She didn’t become famous by choice, her grace under pressure has given her great symbolic importance, which we see repeatedly in her encounters with African American women.

At one point, she explains that as an object of constant hostile scrutiny as the First Lady, she spent “eight years of trying to do everything perfectly” and learned to be “much more scripted.” The truth is, she still comes across as pretty scripted, which makes the film less interesting than, say, a good one-on-one TV interview might be.

The Dalai Lama didn’t even have to marry someone to become famous. As the opening narration of The Dalai Lama: Scientist explains, he was “miraculously discovered to be the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama” and was whisked about to Lhasa to become the political and religious leader of Tibet.

Contrary to the title, the Dalai Lama is not a scientist, though he has a keen lifelong interest in scientific subjects — cosmology and quantum physics to neuroscience and psychology. And, because he’s very famous and revered, he has been able to arrange to meet all kinds of scientists who we see visiting him in public “dialogues,” surrounded by shaven-headed monks.

Some of them became his friend and all of the ones we see on-camera lavishly praise His Holiness’s curiosity and insights. In between, we have pop-up charts showing how modern scientific disciplines just happen to agree with Buddhism again and again. It feels like one long infomercial.

The Dalai Lama is, no doubt, intellectually curious. But the argument that Buddhism’s mental practices are consistent with scientific thinking has been around for more than a century. We also know that hosts of people, scientists included, swear to the mental and physical benefits of meditation.

But other aspects of Buddhist belief — karma or reincarnation, for example — have the opposite of science, and the notion of building bridges between Western and “Buddhist science” make no sense. Take this one with a grain of salt, preferably the Himalayan kind… in big pink crystals.

Becoming. Directed by Nadia Hallgren. With Michelle Obama. Now available on Netflix.

The Dalai Lama: Scientist. Directed by Dawn Engle. Now available on Kanopy (free with a library card) or on AmazonPrime, YouTube, iTunes and Vimeo.