Lucy had the misfortune to have a documentary filmmaker as a father, her dad admits. Most middle class kids are often caught on home video in our digital-mad age, but director Doug Block was a little obsessive in documenting his daughter's life. In his latest film, The Kids Grow Up (out on DVD), it transpires that Lucy, a high school senior, is eagerly applying to colleges on the West Coast—to get away from her East Coast, camera-bug dad!
The Kids Grow Up makes some universal points from its visual scrapbook narrative, but much of it seems peculiar to our particular time and place—and focused on the particular personality of the filmmaker. All of us feel the passage of time and the departure of children to college is one of those markers, albeit in our present economy, they may well return to the nest after graduating for lack of anywhere else to go. But as Block's wife Marjorie points out, he's tried a bit too hard to be Lucy's best pal and suffers from a “Peter Pan complex—you don't want to grow up.” Watching Lucy grow, Block is inescapably confronted by the melancholy of his own aging. Unlike his appearances in footage from Lucy's childhood, Peter Pan, by the time of her high school graduation, has gone gray.
