AFI Dallas: Fat Wan Walking

Steve Vaught is a mess. His thirteen-month walk across the United States was also a mess. It would be a rare filmmaker who could sculpt a coherent tale out of the diverse, sometimes conflicting stories Vaught and his odyssey encompass; unfortunately for Vaught and for us neither P.J. Bagley nor David Mollering are that filmmaker, and as a result “Fat Man Walking” is also a mess.

My uneducated guess is that the filmmakers suffered from three main problems: too little money, too little experience, and too much material. Steve Vaught is a morbidly obese, clinically depressed dude from San Diego who starts walking across the country with an 85-pound backpack and a plethora of personal issues, such as uncontrollable anger and guilt from having killed two elderly pedestrians in an automobile accident. Before setting out he sets up a website and finagles free gear from local stores in exchange for website ads. Over the course of his journey, which will take over a year partially because of trips back to California and breakdowns enroute, he becomes a minor media sensation with appearances on “Today” and “Oprah”. He doesn’t always seem too pleased by all this attention, particularly when the attention turns critical or hostile. He also gets a lucrative book deal but that creates its own problems; his ghostwriter says Vaught’s journal entries are ‘boring’ and ‘pedantic’, and Vaught tells his ghostwriter, “It’s a good thing you’re not within choking distance.”

During the course of the film we see Steve hanging out in hotel rooms more than we actually see him walking. Apparently he tended to walk less when the film crew was around because he had people to hang out with; when he was by himself there was nothing to do but walk. The documentary dudes began to suspect that Steve was fudging the miles he was reporting when they weren’t around – he walked eighteen miles in one day just to prove that he could do it. We don’t see one of the crucial events of the journey – Steve throwing his antidepression medicine down a storm drain – but we do see what is probably one of the results of that decision – Steve exploding in anger and throwing his cell phone against the wall when P. J. Bagley asks him if he ever sees the glass as half full.

It’s a redeeming moment in the film, a sign that, despite the glare-filled camera shots and misspelled titles and underdeveloped themes, these guys are not talentless hacks, that they are capable of asking insightful questions and eliciting a visceral response. These moments are rare, though; I felt like I had a better grasp of the facts of the journey before seeing the film than I did afterward. I think that if if someone who had never heard of the Fat Wan Walking saw the movie, they’d walk out feeling like they had just sat through a stranger’s home movies, too many of which were shot by the drunk guy at the party. They’d also come out with at least one question for Steve Vaught: Do you ever see the glass as half full?