Wild Wild Country

It’s a challenging piece that requires the viewer to acknowledge their own reactions and then question them. In that, Wild Wild Country may be even more vital to a divided nation. It demands you see the other side.

After the six-plus hours of Wild Wild Country flies by, you won't want an approach to this story any different or shorter than what the Ways do. ... By handling this story so intelligently and by opening its heart to a very complicated idea of good and evil, Wild Wild Country has a profound, mesmerizing power itself.

A highly pleasurable new documentary series.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in one exhausting, gripping gulp, it's a slice of partially forgotten history in which real life just keeps getting more and more outlandish and implausible. ... Wild Wild Country a worthwhile thought experiment in addition to a yarn that is, as the title promises, doubly wild.

Wild Wild Country ends up being a character study, an attempt to suss out whether Bhagwan and Sheela really bought what they were selling to white spiritual seekers, making millions in the process. ... That being said, the filmmakers’ tendency to skim over the more unseemly aspects of a story with many unseemly aspects to it may leave viewers wanting to know more about the wilder aspects of the case.

[Chapman and Maclain Way] haven’t given it much of a shape or a perspective--they go from one mind-blowing event and image to the next, and seem to just adopt the point of view of whoever’s talking at the moment, reinforcing it with correspondingly bright or sad or triumphant music (which becomes increasingly intrusive). Their own attitude, as far as it can be divined, appears to be a credulous sentimentality. But it is a great story, even if you just turn on the camera and let it roll.

In an effort to provide both sides of the story, the directors--especially in late, slow-motion-drenched elegiac passages full of uplifting and/or mournful music—buy too much of the pap being sold by the sannyasins. ... As a portrait of militant zeal and religious conflict, Wild Wild Country is a fascinating glimpse at the perils of fanaticism-run-amok and the contentious intersection between faith and freedom.