Parents' Guide to The Minimalists: Less Is Now

Unfortunately, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus present themselves here as gurus, which includes cringe-inducing monologue sets filmed on actual stages. Meanwhile, the conventional documentary style through half of The Minimalists: Less is Now is quite good, informative, and helpful. But the personal side of the film lacks a certain empathy and often comes across as pretentious, self agrandizing, and self promoting. They certainly want to talk about minimalism as much as live it. Thus, half of this documentary is great, but the other half is completely unnecessary. If the film completely cut the personal biographies, life stories of career success and unhappiness, and live performances, leaving a 25-minute documentary, it'd be 4 out of 5 stars.

The central messages are helpful, and many people would benefit from them, but living as a minimalist is certainly presented as a "cure all" to all of life's modern problems. But some experts argue that the minimalist lifestyle movement merely opens up and enables new forms and modes of consumption. Lifestyle minimalists argue that we shouldn't quest for more and more things, and they're right. But they accidentally have replaced that desire with a new one: now we just need to consume, buy, and hold onto the right things and only the right things. Further, the film doesn't provide an objective history of where "minimalism" comes from, from its roots in art criticism (originally used as an insult) to a modern lifestyle, nor does it discuss how the latter has primarily been a recent fad popularized and promoted by the technologically elite and wealthy. There are also historical and cultural factors to consider when arguing that "memories don't reside in things, but people."