Documentary round-up

Inside Job (2010, MC-88) suffered for me from the high expectations I brought to it, having found Charles Ferguson’s first film, No End in Sight, the most enlightening documentary I’d seen about the Iraq War.  So I figured he’d really unpack the banking meltdown of 2008, and very likely I’d join the critics of the Film Comment poll and rank Inside Job among the top handful of films from last year.  Not quite.  The film offers a clear enough picture of the financial skullduggery behind the crisis, and I agree that some people should have gone to jail for it, but I didn’t find its argument as informative and convincing as I expected.  So I can’t quite agree with its Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Another nominee that I found more surprising and satisfying was Waste Land (2010, MC-78), which I will certainly schedule for the Clark at first opportunity.  Vik Muniz is an artist well-known for his re-photographed portraits in chocolate, sugar, or dust, and a pair of matching Madonnas, one in peanut butter and one in jelly.  Lucy Walker’s film follows Muniz when he returns to Brazil, having achieved success in the global art world, in an effort to give something back to the community from which he arose.  He chooses as his focus the largest landfill in the world, where most of the waste in the Rio area goes, and as subject for his portraits the catadores, or pickers, who recycle a modest living out of the piles of garbage.  He takes photos of them, and then enlists their aid in recreating the portraits by arranging refuse on the floor of a warehouse and then re-photographing the construction from above.  He then takes the portrait subjects to a London gallery show and auction of the finished works, returning the money raised to the pickers’ association for mutual aid.  There are many ways this film could have turned icky, but it maintains its humor and intelligence throughout, and winds up quite moving as well.

At first I assumed the HBO documentary Reagan (2011) would be an anodyne celebration of the Gipper’s hundredth birthday, another amnesiac hagiography of the patron saint of all Republicans.  But then I saw that it was directed by Eugene Jarecki, who in Why We Fight went back to Eisenhower’s farewell speech and lucidly showed just how the “military-industrial complex” has taken over in the fifty years since the old soldier’s warning.  This film manages to debunk without anger, and still to celebrate what there was to celebrate in Reagan’s leadership.  It works as a reality check both ways, more a serious work of history than a partisan argument.

Another documentary I approached dubiously on PBS "Independent Lens" series, For Once in My Life (2010), turned out to be well worth seeing.  I suspected this story of a band of variously-disabled performers from a Goodwill facility in Miami getting ready for a big public performance would be a source of saccharine uplift, but the film by James Bigham and Mark Moormann included as much eye-opening insight as special pleading, on the path to its rousing and heartening conclusion.

I also didn’t expect a competition among pastry chefs for the French honor of  “master craftsman” to make for a riveting film either, but I certainly had enough respect for giant of direct cinema D.A. Pennebaker and his partner Chris Hegedus, to give a look to Kings of Pastry (2010, MC-69).  The film baked up more amazement and emotion, not to mention humor and suspense, out of sculptures in sugar than one could have easily imagined going in, with a small subject that revealed unsuspected depths of implication. 

A much weightier subject is addressed in Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2010, MC-78).  Gini Reticker’s film follows a peace movement among Christian and Muslim mothers, led by Leymah Gbowee, which managed to bring an end to Liberia’s civil war with the overthrow and exile of corrupt strongman Charles Taylor.  This film makes an excellent prequel to The Iron Ladies of Liberia, another good documentary which covers the subsequent election of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson as the first woman president in Africa, and the initial efforts at reconstruction by her largely female administration. 

Also worthy of note is the second season of the Sundance Channel series, Brick City (2011), a high-toned reality show that follows Newark mayor Cory Booker as he deals with budget apocalypse and a re-election campaign.  Booker is an admirable and engaging character, a Rhodes scholar who takes on the mission of saving New Jersey’s beleaguered largest city against formidable obstacles, while maintaining some sense of mystery about his private life, if any, and his deepest motivations.  His story is intertwined with that of the police chief and various reforming gang members, as well as the entrenched opposition of native Newark or would-be radical forces.  In the current days of municipal meltdown and threatened default, these stories are important to see, and the comparison to The Wire as a portrait of a city in multiple crises is well-deserved.  Booker’s story is fascinating to follow, from the excellent stand-alone documentary Street Fight, which detailed his first, unsuccessful run for mayor, through the first season of Brick City, in which he wins and takes office for the first time.  I’m eager to see whatever’s next.

As an addendum to the Cinema Salon film club’s first series on “The Art of Documentary,” let me re-recommend F for Fake, Orson Welles’ elegantly braided exploration of art and lying; The Gleaners & I, Agnes Varda’s amusing and thoughtful exploration of the margins of economic system, and an obvious inspiration for Waste Land; and most especially, Heddy Honigmann’s  Forever, which seemed even better to me on second viewing, in its exploration of death and immortality, art and memory, through the window of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.