Netflix’s Trainwreck anthology is, unsurprisingly, a hit, its weekly episodes about bizarre high-profile events in recent history routinely lodging themselves in the streamer’s top 10. Trainwreck: Balloon Boy is the series’ latest ballyhoo documentary, chronicling the misadventures of a Colorado family who launched a homemade helium-powered “UFO” into the air, then roused authorities and national media attention – always with the national media attention in these docs – when they worried their six-year-old boy was hiding inside as it floated way way up in the sky for a couple hours. The whole to-do was revealed to be a hoax, although the perpetrators to this day insist it actually wasn’t – which makes this go-round for Trainwreck more compelling than the other, frustratingly shallow entries I’ve seen so far (Mayor of Mayhem, Poop Cruise, and The Real Project X). Turns out this nutty-ass story fits the series’ get-in-and-out-in-under-an-hour M.O. pretty well.
The Gist: You may recall most of this saga from a couple hours’ worth of tweets and some memes of questionable taste, but it has some crazy plot twists beyond the big one, so I won’t spoil too much of it for anyone who wasn’t hip to the insanity that played out in Oct., 2009 in Fort Collins. Meet the Heenes: Mom: Mayomi. Dad: Richard. Three sons: Bradford, Ryo and the youngest, six-year-old Falcon. They’re the kind of people who waver between endearing and grating on the eccentricity scale, although the grating stuff doesn’t emerge until after we cross the NO SPOILERS line. Richard sets the tone as a wackadoo fella whose “research projects” and “science experiments” are kinda-sweet family-bonding projects – and that “kinda” bears a lot of weight when you realize he’s throwing the kids in the car to go chase a tornado. People who know Richard describe him as a bunch of things ranging from “crazy” to “smart,” although “crazy” here probably passes for “stupid” or “reckless.”
But this project seemed harmless enough: A six-foot-tall, 20-foot-wide “UFO” pieced together out of foil, tarps, lumber, duct tape and string. “A Jiffy Pop popcorn thing” is one objective observer’s description of it. Richard’s plan, he said, was to keep it tethered and let it hover at an altitude of about 20 feet over the backyard. Now, before we get to the frantic 911 call, the Heenes chronicled their projects on video, with Bradford often behind the camera. We see a bunch of that footage here, and the now-20-something Bradford shares how his little brother Falcon was a boundary-testing kind of kid who was “always getting into stuff.” E.g., the small compartment in the body of the UFO, beneath the balloon. The space was perfectly six-year-old-sized, and we see clips of various family members shooing him out of there.
Launch day arrives. A camera on a tripod captures the mayhem as the UFO lifts off, taking the tethers with it. Richard flies off the handle, angrily accusing Mayomi of not securing the tethers. “They snapped!” she protests as the UFO floats up, up, up, up. Then, in a panic, Bradford shouts that Falcon was in the UFO. Everyone scrambles. Can’t find him. Imagine how confused the 911 operator was – and we can joke about this now, and you’ll learn why in a sentence or three here. Also imagine how the TV news people salivated when Richard called them and asked them to help by sending their helicopter up there to find the “balloon boy.” Authorities finally found the dot in the sky and chased it for nearly two hours, 55 miles, as it ran out of helium and floated to the ground… empty. No Falcon. Freakout city. Did he fall out? Oh man. Cops searched the Heene house multiple times, with no luck. Some time passes, and then, O HAI, FALCON. He’s right there. In the house.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Balloon Boy is sorta like Fyre Festival or Savior for Sale crossed with Bubble Boy. Sorta.
Performance Worth Watching: There are definitely performances in this movie, it’s just really hard to tell who’s performing, and how much.
Memorable Dialogue: The local sheriff better be a fisherman: “My immediate response was, ‘You have to be jerking my bobber.’”
Sex and Skin: None. He’s almost certainly a fisherman.
Our Take: Balloon Boy has all the trappings of your typical media-goes-bananas-over-a-viral-story recappery, but one little detail that just zooms by in the doc is one that should make the record-scratch fzwooop noise and give us pause: Richard called the media first under the pretense that their helicopter could come in handy. Do the Fort Collins cops not have helicopters? That’s a tell that this guy might be perpetrating a hoax for whatever reason he wants attention, but it can be explained away and it’s circumstantial and… well, that’s the way so much of this story plays out.
The first half of the doc recaps the main dramatic thrust – the UFO goes up, comes down empty and then Falcon turns up, having hidden in the garage attic for hours. He fell asleep, he said. The Heenes claim they agreed to make media appearances hoping that news trucks and microphone jockeys would get off their lawn, which is a tell, but it can be explained away and it’s circumstantial and all that. They were being interviewed live on national TV by Katie Couric when Falcon said to his parents, “You guys said that we did this for a show,” and then felt too nauseous to continue the interview, as his parents scramble to explain what he actually meant by that comment. From there, all the Heenes’ testimonials for Trainwreck director Gillian Pachter become dreaded Untrustworthy Narration.
The second half plays out as a quest to flush out the incredibly stubborn truth, with both sides prompting us to question their credibility. The Heenes insist it wasn’t a hoax. One of the family’s defenders ends up being their lawyer, and you know how we should feel about lawyers in documentaries – they don’t help the Untrustworthy Narration become more trustworthy. I can’t remember if the self-proclaimed psychic who was on Wife Swap with Richard and Mayomi Heene – jeezoman, this story is nuts – defends them or not, because it’s far too easy to write off testimonials from self-proclaimed psychics, who are even worse for the Untrustworthy Narration than lawyers. As for what’s happening with the skeptics, searching for clarity in the commentary of the police who worked the case is another exercise in frustration; they dismiss the lawyer guy as “anti-cop” and then lie to Richard to get him to come to the station and submit to a polygraph, which only further muddies the waters.
Which is to say, many people in this documentary are jerks, even the journalists, because they once again clamped down on a ridiculous story and shook it until it was threadbare – and if they didn’t do that in the first place, maybe potentially attention-thirsty weirdos like Richard Heene wouldn’t stage publicity stunts. Questions spring out of the narrative about child manipulation and the ethics of media frenzies, fringe thematics that might take deeper root in a documentary series that’s more concerned with journalistic integrity than Trainwreck’s pursuit of amusement. But Balloon Boy, in making us wonder if the entire Heene family colluded on this stunt and stuck to it for 15 years despite the fact that Occam’s Razor tells us they’re most likely cuckoo fakers, has all the moral ambiguity a quest-for-a-likely-unattainable-truth doc needs. The truth is a thing we chase and chase and chase and so very rarely attain.
Our Call: Well, Netflix just gave the Heenes even more attention – and probably some cash, too. Man, this story has me all twisted up. Are these people dinks or not? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.