Title: Devil’s Playground
Genre: Documentary
Cast: Velda Bontrager, Joann Hochstetler, Emma Miller, Faron Yoder, Gerald Yutzy…
Director: Lucy Walker
Release: (2002)
Imagine yourself in college, on that very first all-out, beach-week blitz, full-fledged Spring Break. If you’ve been before, you’ll know what I mean. If not, let me paint a little more. Complete, hedonistic freedom for the first time in your young life. Alcohol? You could swim in it. Drugs? There are no laws here. Sex? Not hard to find. Curfew? Geshundheit. Got it all in your head? Now, imagine taking that trip with everything I just described – when you were 16. And just to turn it up a notch, here’s the kicker: at the end of the trip you have to choose between (a) remaining on Spring Break, free to party, explore, travel, do whatever you want, or (b) to join a monastery and renounce forever all of the worldly pleasures you’ve just discovered for the first time. Oh yeah, one more thing, it’s only if you choose the monastery that you can ever talk to your family and friends again. To choose the freedom is to give up contact with everyone you’ve ever loved and known, forever.
Imagine this and you’ll have some idea of the issues facing the children in Devil’s Playground – the Amish youth set free at 16 on “rumspringa”. This unexpectedly captivating documentary focuses on the lives of a handful of Amish youth battling with a decision they have been preparing to face for their entire lives and yet for which, as they quickly discover, they arrive at hopelessly unprepared to make. At the heart of the film is a compelling profile of one particularly tortured soul, a boy named Faron Yoder. Within a few minutes of knowing him, it’s clear that Faron will struggle with his decision much more than most. Beneath a quirky charm and waifish surfer-boy look, lies a haunted, fragile, little boy facing this choice with the dual handicaps of a heightened self-awareness and an intensely sensitive soul – two things that he cannot find in the peers he tries desperately to relate to. His yearning to reconcile the life he’s always known with his need for some greater meaning for his own existence propels him down a harrowing path of desperation, drug addiction, depression and redemption that will remind you just exactly what empathy for someone you’ve never met can feel like.
Imagine a young Jason Mewes, relocated in time and space to be born Amish. Throw onto that tale a real-life story of a salvational young love that would make you roll your eyes and groan out loud if Hollywood ever tried to script it for you. Take these two elements together and you’ll begin to have a good conception of the journey of Faron Yoder.
Devil’s Playground gives the viewer a rare and fascinating look into a culture of people living right in this very country who have managed to stay vastly under the radar of society for hundreds of years, and offers an amazing insight into the customs they practice that lead over 90% of the children of “rumspringa” to ultimately renounce our world, and all of it’s progress and pleasures, and return to theirs. What amounts to the defining stories of about a half dozen young lives is encapsulated and offered succinctly by director Lucy Walker for a mere 77 minutes of your own. Not really a tough decision to make, when you think about it.
Grading
Story: A
Acting: N/A
Visuals: N/A
Originality/Innovation: B+
Enjoyability: A
DVD Extras: C
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