The Philosopher Kings

There’s a tendency among well-meaning liberals to romanticize the people most of us look past as we race through our day — the homeless, the working poor — as founts of uncommon common sense and great spiritual insight. Director Patrick Shen comes close to doing just that in his documentary The Philosopher Kings but mercifully falls short of such a noble misfire. Instead he’s crafted a hypnotic, moving paean to the complex lives of his subjects, a half-dozen custodians at institutions of higher learning all across the country. Shen treks coast to coast — and even to Haiti — to get the backstories on the folks (Vietnam vets, survivors of domestic abuse, immigrants) who clean toilets and offices and perform sundry other duties at some of our most prestigious colleges and universities. One man works days as a custodian and nights as a cabdriver to support both his massive extended family and his village in Haiti; another is a fledgling political artist, who studies the work created by students at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts so he can better create his own agitprop. The visuals are crisp, and Shen’s seamless editing creates conversation between his various subjects, as the spoken musing of one plays over the images of another. Kings arcs hard toward its uplifting ending, but it also completely earns it.