Fatherhood is a major subject of discomfort. It's examined most visibly through Liu's interviews with Zack, who's so charming and observant that you don't immediately notice how depressed, resentful and self-destructive he is. (In the movie's most vivid instance of self-awareness, he asks the filmmaker if they're doing the sort of interview where he pretends that the camera's not on him, or the sort where he acknowledges it.) Zack loves his girlfriend and young son but fights with her all the time and ends up seesawing between being a sensitive and loving father and an absent presence. He's trying, but he's a mess.
In time, we start to understand why this is. Several of the young men in "Minding the Gap" endured childhood abuse that was characterized as "discipline," and it's clear that the experience deformed their sense of what it means to be a father and a man. Even when Liu's male subjects seem keenly aware of the damage done to them, and the necessity of overcoming it for the sake of their happiness and that of future generations, they lack meaningful conceptual tools with which to process and analyze what happened, which means they're at risk of repeating the cycle of misery that affected them as children: paying it forward in the worst way. The women—represented mainly by Nina and Keire and Liu's mothers—are trapped in their own cycle, struggling to love and understand the men who often make their lives miserable.
Liu's generosity as a filmmaker refuses to consign any character to either/other categories. They're always both/and. You like them, you want them to succeed, you understand why they are the way they are, and yet at the same time you're allowed to be frustrated with their inability to see themselves clearly and change their lives. It's all honest and true to the experience of being alive—a maddening emotional tangle.
Keire absorbs and radiates the audience's empathy. He seems incapable of hiding what he's feeling. His sensitivity to his own trauma and that of others gives the film a lot of its gut-punch force. He's as tough as the rest, yet paradoxically the one who cries most openly, often when contemplating his troubled childhood (his father beat him, yet he still worships the man) and the sacrifices his mother made. Keire is also the means by which the movie conveys its subtle racial critiques. He's usually the character who makes the others aware of their whiteness (an advantage he and Liu will never have), yet because he phrases observations as jokes or teasing asides, they tend to spark conversation rather than shut it down (though sometimes his statements just sort of hang in the air, unacknowledged).
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46moKecmaO0bsDHnmSgmaBif3F9lw%3D%3D