Blink of an Eye movie review & film summary (2019)

Talking about this life-changing incident at the beginning of the documentary “Blink of an Eye,” which is based off a book co-written with Ellis Henican and executive produced by Waltrip, Waltrip says the saddest thing in the entire movie: “17 years later, I haven’t gone to therapy, and I still struggle with it.” This documentary then becomes a pseudo-session for him, at least in that it has him recounting his life, while others NASCAR personalities, including his racer brother Darrell Waltrip, chime in. “You gotta keep pushin’,” Waltrip concludes in the film's opening segment, and with the slide of a blues guitar and the usage of generic down-home stock footage, it’s off to Waltrip’s life story of being an underdog, racing in the shadow of his older NASCAR driver brother, Darrell. 

There are numerous jarring focus choices with how director Paul Taublieb approaches this story, starting with how it introduces the tragedy—before the credits are even over, before we understand what movie we're even seeing, and in between staged footage of Waltrip driving a pick-up through the countryside, with a sad look on his face. He’s shown turning up the volume on a country ballad that’s playing for all of us to hear, and it’s called “Blink of an Eye.” A voice on the radio dedicates it to him. It’s a strange start, and the focus on Waltrip primarily is even more jarring as it takes an event and makes it more about Waltrip, framing Earnhardt as a supporting character in Waltrip’s racing career. 

This documentary proves to not so much be about the event—which is visually covered seemingly with the help of whatever broadcast footage was available—but about Waltrip, building an hour of backstory to the event that should have been the happiest in his life. And yet framing this tragedy as Waltrip not getting some type of rite of passage, with the sadness of his friend dying in a car wreck, is an incredibly tricky thing to balance. This movie’s dry, facts-first approach does not have the capacity to pull it off. 

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