The Boston Globe:
"A relentlessly stunning film. With the possible exception of "The Thin Blue Line," no documentary
in recent memory delivers more psychological insight--or emotional wallop. The pacing is flawless,
the editing superb."
Variety
July 26, 1989:
The five Yale grads, class of 1963, who courageously bare their souls in
the docu[mentary] Halftime...emerge as vividly as any fictional
characters in a first-rate feature film. That is a tribute to the
iconoclastic intelligence brought to this project by filmmakers David W.
Keller and David Sutherland, who explore the male midlife crisis without
settling for cliches or easy answers.
'Halftime': A Look at Male Midlife
By Paul Henniger
Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1989
The Yale graduating class of 1963 was the last of its type. They were 800 in number, all males, only two blacks and one Chinese among them. The next year, college campuses began to become radically different, with the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam War and the many other upheavals of that decade.
One member of that class, David Keller, wanted to do something meaningful for the 25th reunion...He produced Halftime, a revealing, emotional, compassionate documentary portrait of five of his classmates sharing their feelings about their lives at this midpoint in life; their problems, successes and failures in jobs and marriages.
Sutherland didn't want the film to turn into the visual monotony of just "talking heads." He designed a dramatic three-part structure: a visit to their homes, [Dr. Daniel J.] Levinson's interviews with each (in a confessional-type atmosphere), and a forum bringing them all together to get their reactions to each other's stories.
Sutherland avoided a narrator to let the men speak for themselves; taught them to direct themselves, talk directly into the lens. All this took about 70 hours to film and was edited down to 90 minutes.
...When the five are brought together for the forum, director Sutherland says, "One guy works as a foil for another, so you can play [with camera] one guy off another for some interesting reactions."
- Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival- 1987
- Gold Plaque, Chicago International Film Festival for Documentary Features- 1986
- CINE Golden Eagle- 1986
- Selected by the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation for its series featuring the outstanding documentary films of 1986
- Chosen by The Boston Herald as one of the ten best movies of 1986
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