Dreams of a Life

Movie Title--  Dreams of a Life

Release Year--  2011

Running Time--  1 Hour and 31 Minutes

Film Type--  Documentary

Cast--  Zawe Ashton

A documentary about Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died in her North London bedsit and wasn't discovered until three years later, with her television still on.

In 2006, repo men were sent to the North London bedsit (for anyone unclear, a bedsit is a one room flat (or apartment) that is common in the UK) of Joyce Carol Vincent but instead found a badly decomposed body with the television still playing and unopened Christmas presents surrounding her.  The Police determined her cause of death to be due to natural causes since the medical examiner concluded that the remains were mostly skeletal, so badly, in fact, that she had to be identified by her dental records.  The blurb that was published in the paper said very little about her and did not include a picture.  A neighbor said that he had smelled funny smells coming from the bedsit but never reported it because the thought that maybe it was actually from some garbage bins nearby.

Some of her friends were interviewed and none of them realized that the small blurb about the woman in the paper was the same person that had been their friend and all of them were horrified to hear that she had been dead for three years before anyone even knew she was there.  One man is particularly shocked that she had four sisters and not one of them cared enough to report her missing.  

Very little is known about Joyce but here are a few facts:

Joyce Carol Vincent was born in October 1965 to a mother from India and a father from Grenada.  She was the youngest of five girls.  Her mother died when she was 11, leaving a profound impression on her.  She had an emotionally strained relationship with her father after her mother died.  She was not proud of her father, whom often acted as if he were 20 or 30 and wished that he would act more his age.

The friends whom were interviewed described Joyce as petite, attractive and annoyingly happy.  They also said she was well spoken and although she spoke softly she always spoke clearly.  They said she seemed well educated and that they always assumed that she were living a very middle class life, although she was actually living much more lowly than that.  It was said that Joyce never really seemed to have her own interests and she just became involved in whatever the man she was currently dating was interested in.  Joyce is described as a drifter and that sometimes her friends would not see her for six months or so at a time.

What nobody knew was that after she left her well paying job in 2001, she stayed for a while in a domestic abuse shelter and took on a job as a cleaner in a motel, although all of her friends had said she had always hated to do manual labor.  In November 2003, she was admitted to the hospital after vomiting blood and was treated for a peptic ulcer.  Under next of kin on her forms she listed her bank manager.  She died in December 2003.

This is a sad story.  It really makes a person step back and look at their lives.  This woman, who by all accounts seemed very well liked just drifted away from everyone she knew and after she died, no one knew she was even gone.  She had gone so unnoticed that it took 2,400 Pounds of debit for anyone to even discover that she had died.

This really was not my favorite documentary.  It is sad and tragic but since she was so badly decomposed when she died, there is no way to tell if she died of natural causes or if she had fallen victim of foul play, so the whole thing just fades out with only speculation from the people that knew her as to what may have happened.  

The people that were interviewed were pleasant for the most part and had mostly good things to say but at the same time, sometimes they strayed a little and it seemed like they were almost making fun of her, which for some reason strikes a cord with me as I was taught to not speak ill of the dead.

What this all comes down to is that although the story is interesting and sad, the film is a little underwhelming.  There is no conclusion about her death, since not enough could be learned from the body and the people that knew her didn't really know her at all because she kept herself distanced from everyone.  If you are looking for a documentary to watch, you time will probably be better spent finding another.  If you want to know about Joyce Carol Vincent and her very tragic story, you can get what you are looking for from Wikipedia in just a few minutes, don't waste your hour and a half on this one, you will only be disappointed.  Don't Forget the Popcorn.