Shadow Billionaire (Alexis Spraic, 2009): USA

Reviewed by Paula Gomez. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2010.

Shadow Billionaire is an artistic documentary full of mystery and suspense. It encompasses the life and death of a billionaire, and the people who fought for the rights of his estate. It is a memorable film sure to please any viewer intrigued by the predicament of greed. This film was viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The sound and sights of a plane flying over an ocean appear on the screen. The colors are grainy and the brightness is overexposed. Suddenly the screen becomes fully overexposed and the sound of the plane ceases to exist. DHL founder and billionaire Larry Hillblom is assumed to have been on that plane which symbolically disappears from the screen. The mystery behind Larry’s disappearance is just the start of this intriguing journey of deceit, greed, and disapproval. An attorney driven fight for his estate begins between his business partners and the children no one in his family knew he had.  Strategy, dominance, and power resound in this well documented story about the struggle for Larry’s legitimate children to obtain a piece of his fortune after his death.

One of the most charismatic characters in the movie is the lawyer representing the children. In a way, the movie is about him too for he tells the viewer how he struggled and fought for what he believed was an honest and true cause. His charisma resonates with the audience when he says that “he didn’t think he was smarter then the other lawyers” who also wanted a piece of the billionaire’s estate and did not want to give anything to the children who mysteriously kept appearing just after Larry’s death, but that “they were just simply dumber [or more naïve].”

The themes of greed, prostitution, astute strategies, and friendship surface every now and then. The law is broken several times and funny moments under a sea of seriousness help the movie move along in a casual rather than a strict-serious tone. For example, in one of the scenes in which the children’s lawyers go into Larry’s old house with a tractor in order to unbury a pile of materials that could contain DNA evidence, they search and search without any luck. It is a dead cause until the tractor driver asks them: “are you looking for the buried evidence? Because I know where it is: I buried it.”

The style of the movie consists of a lot of interviews with cutaway shots to what appears to be old looking grainy footage of the beach. Going back to the beach every now and then help remind the audience that Larry’s disappearance was a tragic mystery. The grainy aspect that is similar to the quality of consumer cameras sold in the 90’s (the time in which this even occurred), help the movie feel more real and believable as a true story. The interview scenes seemed to be conventional, with subjects filmed in a straight-ahead point of view. Many of those interviews have the subjects’ heads chopped off. I believe that chopping the heads was a distraction since the shots were not of extreme close ups.

This movie was exciting overall, nevertheless. The story was well developed and the cutaways of the ocean that symbolized the place of Larry’s fatal death as well as the funny moments sporadically inserted throughout the movie made it more special. Anyone who is interested in stories involving money, fame, and a tragic death will be surely pleased as viewers after watching Shadow Billionaire.