“The great irony is, while Buddhism is considered a shelter from Judeo-Christian guilt and judgment for so many Buddhist wannabes, great stretches of Dörrie’s film are taken up with scolding lectures on the excess and waste of Western lifestyles, illustrated with jeering shots of groaning supermarket shelves and overweight fast-food diners. The low point is a digression featuring a San Franciscan boomer, a middle-aged, middle-class white woman in dreadlocks and orange boiler suit who proudly details the foraging and dumpster diving that’s allowed her to avoid paying for food for years. (Except, of course, for $8 pints of her favourite boutique ice cream.)
“It doesn’t take much to see that her ostentatiously self-abnegating lifestyle — much like that of the wet-eyed seekers at Brown’s retreats — is a pure product of luxury, and a society that not only wastes enough to allow her to live on its refuse, but is willing to indulge her fantasy of rebellion. They might not see it, but so much of Brown and his fellow seekers’ self-conscious rejection of their society, expressed with overbearing self-righteousness in Dörrie’s film, has more to do with puritan, non-conformist Protestantism than with an austere Buddhist ideal.”
