Post Description

HBO documentaire Redemption.

On Thursday, Lifetime rolled out “Million Dollar Shoppers,” a braying reality show about gratingly annoying people who shop for some of the New York area’s super-rich. 

On Monday night, HBO offers the documentary short “Redemption,” a delicate portrait of those bedraggled people, some of them homeless, who walk New York City streets collecting cans and bottles for the nickel deposit.

Watching one, then the other, might make you apoplectic. “Redemption” is by Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, whose earlier films — like “Section 60,” about the families of war dead — showed that the most powerful documentary technique can be simply to observe. Here that approach is applied to the people many New Yorkers explicitly try not to observe as they pass by on the street, pushing carts and lugging bags full of cans and bottles. We hear their voices and see how they live. 
“Fifty cans: $2.50,” says a 60-year-old named Walter, holding a Starbucks drink. He likes to describe such things in terms of how many cans he’d need to buy them. Later, in front of a town house with a for-sale sign, he says, “A hundred million cans.” 

These canners are well aware of how they are viewed by the rest of the city.