Ed Perkins finds an invaluable subject in Garnet Frost, the central figure in the documentary film Garnet’s Gold. Garnet is whimsical and romantic—clearly a brilliant man and ever-busy with one project or another. But at 58, he reflects regretfully on his life, looking back along a timeline crowded with near-events: “I dunno what she might ideally have wanted for me. But whatever it was I’ll never quite be that,” he says about his mother. “Of all the things I’ve nearly done…there’s many, many, many things I’ve nearly done, but not. Show me a man who hasn’t.”
He is particularly fixated on a near-death experience he had 20 years ago. Walking through the remote Scottish wilds, sans map and totally alone, he became trapped in a crevice. By sheer luck, he was discovered and saved. Where the film picks up, Garnet’s 20-year preoccupation has come to a head: trapped in that crevice, he found a mysterious staff pegged between the rocks. He suspects the object may have been a marker for the famed treasure of Bonnie Prince Charlie, lost in 1746—a treasure Garnet now plans to find.
Perkins began filming Garnet four years before his project would be completed. We see his subject singing with gusto at his regular pub and engaged in his latest project, a Houdini-style stunt. We are welcomed into Garnet’s eminently English home—a space cluttered with artifacts that Perkins uses to frame and bolster his portrait of the man. We meet Garnet’s mother, an angelic figure worthy of documentation in her own right. She remains rosy cheeked and smart as a whip even as her health declines, offering the central wisdom for Garnet’s trip: “Well I hope he finds something, whatever it is. If it’s not gold, it’s his heart’s desire.”
The narrative never fools itself that Garnet is seeking literal gold. As he journeys—almost back in time—to the spot where he nearly died, he reunites with the meaning of life beyond the could-have-beens and nearlies that populate a timeline predicated on monumental achievement.
The camera possesses wisdom in its own right, laying bare the inherent value of the souls it films. It seems less to “shoot” its subjects than to caress them, less to “capture” than to free. This is particularly true in lingering close-ups of interviewees, which take apparent joy from every unique mannerism.
Perkins is handy with a few symbolic threads, compressing time and meaning as in any film but, here, to unusually striking effect. The minutiae of physical detail in urban scenes is contrasted, but not discordant, with sweeping shots of unpopulated Scottish landscape. A rapid-fire montage—shots from various temporal points in the film—as well as the haunting inclusion of non-diegetic sound as Garnet clamors through water and rocks, provide an added injection of awe, magic, omnipotence. Whether such tricks are necessary is beyond the point; they are playful and profound, like Garnet.
When he returns from his trip, reconciled with his life and rejuvenated, Garnet recites a poem for his mother. His delivery is stirring, the lines themselves expressing a triumph over all the things “nearly done.” The viewer wonders for a moment which celebrated poet might have penned them. “Well,” his mother chimes in, “you did write that. And I think it’s rather a good poem, Garnet.” The film and its quixotic subject finally see Garnet for what he really is: a man of extraordinary action.
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