‘Trainwreck: Balloon Boy’ Is A Fascinating Documentary That Takes Multiple Fun Turns

Just when it seemed like Trainwreck had reached its lowest ebb with a thoroughly uninteresting instalment, along comes Balloon Boy. This story of an apparent hoax from 2009 has all the hallmarks of a great story – compelling characters, a weird premise, and several surprising turns that keep the viewer on their toes, throwing in new questions whenever it seems like the old ones have been answered.

I’ll confess to being totally unfamiliar with the story, which helped. For others who remember the misguided homemade UFO launch of the eccentric Heene family, mileage may vary. The scandal made national news in the U.S., which in the latter half of the film becomes a focal point of the narrative, as media scrutiny leads to outrage and eventually criminal charges. Director Gillian Pachter does an excellent job of formally reshaping Balloon Boy to suit each new arc, starting out as a tense search-and-rescue, then becoming a cautionary tale about the lengths people will go to for attention, before finally raising the idea of judicial corruption and strong-arming innocent people into reputational ruin.

Back in 2009, Larimer County resident Richard Heene, a self-proclaimed inventor and storm chaser — which should set some alarm bells ringing at the best of times — built a helium-powered UFO in his back garden. Richard, who appears often in the documentary, explains that he was pursuing some Jetsons-style dream wherein everyone would fly to work, alleviating congestion, but it seems like a vanity project to me. Either way, it works well enough to get aloft. The only problem is that his wife, Mayumi, didn’t tie it down properly, so the craft floats off, supposedly with their six-year-old son, Falcon, inside.

And so begins a nervy rescue operation as national media and rescue teams attempt to track the balloon before it crashes into something or runs out of helium and plummets to the ground. A “time in the air” timer makes the ticking clock explicit as the whole nation remains on tenterhooks, hoping they don’t see a six-year-old fall to his death on live television. If, like me, you have no idea what’s coming next, the whole thing is riveting, evoking the dread that Trainwreck was able to build around the AstroWorld disaster.

Eventually, and luckily, the balloon floated to the ground without incident, but Falcon wasn’t inside. It turns out he was asleep in the garage attic, totally oblivious. To try and ameliorate the media frenzy, Richard agrees to appear on The Larry King Show, where Falcon suggests that the whole thing was a hoax, renewing interest in the case for radically different reasons. In another TV appearance designed to make the first look more legitimate, Falcon becomes physically ill live on air. The kid’s a nightmare on a grandmaster level.

In an effort to convince the public of the test flight’s legitimacy, Richard released home footage of the test flight that shows him flipping out like a madman at his wife when the UFO flew off, and being told by his other son, Bradford, that Falcon was inside. Given Richard and Mayumi’s earlier appearance on Wife Swap, now widely known thanks to the media’s framing of the couple as desperate for fame and their own show, everyone believes they’re acting in the footage. What was initially a search-and-rescue operation becomes a criminal investigation, and the interplay between reality and the media is reminiscent of Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem.

Trainwreck: Balloon Boy is brilliantly engaging in every mode. The choice of talking heads, from the Heenes’ former neighbours Dean Askew and Tina Chavez, to several media and Larimer County Sheriff’s Office personnel, and even the self-proclaimed “psychic” who Richard moved in with during his time on Wife Swap, presents an even-handed portrayal of a wildly eccentric man who might just as easily have been a misunderstood pioneer as a sinister, manipulative narcissist. Nobody can quite say for sure; even after Richard pleaded guilty, apparently under threat of his wife’s deportation after a “coerced” confession, he was granted a pardon in 2020. If nothing else, he’s a character – the CCTV footage of him bamboozling a polygraph test is hysterically funny.

I have no idea which aspects of Balloon Boy are accurate, who’s telling the truth, and what really happened with the Heene UFO. Perhaps nobody ever will. What I do know is that when Richard says he’s working on something new, and that it’s going to be really big, I believe him.