Further documendations

Now I have more than half a year of documentaries to write up, so let’s get crackin’ --

I never was a fan of Roger Ebert, always considered it a coincidence when we had the same opinion of a movie, but the film adaptation of Ebert’s memoir Life Itself (MC-87, NFX) certainly enhances my esteem.  In a nice bit of payback, Steve James’ documentary returns the favor Ebert did him by championing Hoop Dreams.  This film champions Ebert in turn, but in an authentic way, rather than as a celebrity puff piece.  One talking-head comment stands out in defining the tone of the whole, “Roger was a nice guy … but he wasn’t that nice.”  Rather he was one of those driven souls who knew as a kid what he wanted to do with his life, and did it relentlessly, literally to his deathbed.  So we find out about the neighborhood paper he wrote and distributed in grade school, editorship of the Daily Illini, temporary job on the Chicago Sun-Times, until a chance assignment as film critic overturned his plan to get a PhD in English; later, his highly competitive love/hate relationship with Gene Siskel on succeeding iterations of their dueling movie critic show on TV; then his mentorship of generations of critics and filmmakers, his late marriage to a black woman, and finally a candid view of his confrontation with disease and death.  It feels very much like a man in full, and one to earn my respect and admiration.  In the end, Roger and I share the bedrock principle that film is a “machine that generates empathy.”

Go figure!  Hollywood loves to honor itself, so it’s amazing that Life Itself was not even Oscar-nominated, but less amazing that Best Documentary went to Citizenfour (MC-88, NFX).  I came late to this film, so it struck me as old news, rather than a stunning revelation.  As a portrait of Edward Snowden, I found the film impressive and mind-changing, but as an exposé of NSA surveillance, I felt Laura Poitras sacrificed substance for atmospherics, trying for a real-life chiller thriller, instead of a convincing argument.  I would definitely like to see Snowden put in Errol Morris’s Interrotron, so I could look into his eyes and see his soul (as Bush purportedly did to Putin -- yeah, Georgie, and were your eyeballs scorched?).  This film certainly made me more sympathetic to Snowden, more approving of his motives.  Maybe it was good to be spared dodgy Presidential apologists, but I could have done with more viewpoints expressed and more expert commentary, fewer portentously prolonged mood shots. And less focus on celebrity journalists whose investigatory motives I don’t take on faith, like Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill (of Dirty Wars).  Worth seeing, this documentary did not engage me nearly as much as many others.

For example, Last Days in Vietnam (MC-86, NFX), which far exceeded my expectations, and was a more worthy nominee.  From Rory Kennedy, I expected perhaps a celebrity-directed, talking-heads retrospective.  What I got was a riveting you-are-there action-thriller with heart.  You don’t just look at the famous photos, such as the one of people climbing up a ladder dangling from a helicopter above the US Embassy in Saigon.  You learn who those people were, where they were coming from, where they were headed, including helicopter pilots and the ones left on the ground.  It’s astounding how cameras seemed to be everywhere, recording this hinge of history, to build a propulsive visual narrative, as well as the later perspective of survivors, without any apologists or pontificators.  This film is persuasively real and deeply felt – essential viewing for anyone who lived through that era, and edifying for anyone younger.  This is what it’s like to lose a war.

In many ways, including Oscar-nomination, Virunga (MC-95, NFX) is the same.  This war is for Congo’s Virunga National Park, one of the last habitats of the mountain gorilla, of whom perhaps 800 survive.  Orlando von Einsiedel’s documentary is a powerful work of advocacy, told with the narrative drive of the war film that it is.  With the help of astonishing footage, shot surreptitiously or on the fly, without any narration beyond a few printed captions, and no talking heads other than those caught in heat of the action, the film paints a clear picture of the depredations of a British oil company that wants to undermine the park, literally, and supports rebel forces to overturn the standing order.  The park has a force of armed rangers, hoping to combat poaching, but overwhelmed by finding themselves on the front lines of a civil war.  The gorillas, and other wildlife, are camera-friendly bystanders to the human conflict, but their reactions to the violence are telling, as are those of each of their human relatives.  One of the most poignant characters is a native caretaker for some orphaned gorillas; also fascinating are the Belgian commandant of the park rangers, and the young female French journalist, whom the equally intrepid cameraman follows into the warzone.  Not easy to watch, but well worth seeing.

The Overnighters (MC-89, NFX) deserves its accolades, but not without a certain reservation on my part.  Though telegraphed in the opening scene, this story contains such a dramatic reversal that it almost becomes a voyeuristic invasion of privacy.  We can’t stop looking, however, and maybe it was the same for the filmmaker Jesse Moss, working by himself in verité style.  What we start with is a story of economic dislocation, with the Great Recession driving hoards of jobless men to Williston ND, where a fracking oil boom promises immediate work.  The work proves elusive, however, and a place to stay nearly impossible to find.  So a kindly pastor opens his church, and its parking lot, to overnight stays by homeless men.  He meets opposition from his parishioners and town officials, not to mention the stresses he puts on his family.  Genuinely striving to be “his brother’s keeper,” his motives turn out to be mixed.  The film delivers on the sucker punch feinted at in the beginning – its intimacy shocking and disturbing.  Looking into issues of compassion and community, the story turns into a personal agony.  It works, but feels a bit queasy in intent, like a bait and switch.  Yet still admirable, if that makes any sense.  

Another affecting portrayal of hard times and frail hopes, Rich Hill (MC-75, NFX), winner of top prize at Sundance last year, follows three teenage boys growing up over a year and a half, in the ironically-named town of Rich Hill, MO.  This could have been miserablist poverty porn, but co-directors and cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo leaven the tragedy with homegrown affection for small-town mid-America.  The three boys, however, are in dire straits, exemplars of so many pathologies of poverty, as well as distinctive personalities in separate stories, which never meet, but do add up.  In a tradition going back to Jacob Riis, this is “how the other half lives.”

By chance I happened to watch in succession two contrasting documentaries about American writers born in 1933.  Regarding Susan Sontag (MC-79, NFX, HBO) brings a lot of visual pizzazz, to the point of intrusiveness, to the story of the most photographed woman of letters ever, even before she partnered with Annie Leibovitz.  I wouldn’t call it debunking, but it’s certainly not uncritical.  Philip Roth: Unmasked (MC-65, NFX, PBS) is straight talking-heads, and rather misnamed.  The Philip Roth Version would be more accurate, but it is certainly interesting enough to hear that version from the man himself and his friends.  However different, I would recommend either film to anyone with a real interest in its subject.

I’d go a good deal further with Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (NFX, PBS).  I’d recommend to anyone with eye and heart.  There’s a lot more to Lange than her iconic Depression-era photograph Migrant Mother, and this film covers her whole life with great intimacy, lovingly directed and narrated by her granddaughter, Dyanna Taylor.  Of particular note are interviews with Lange as she was putting together a career retrospective of her photographs shortly before her death in 1965.  This appeared on the PBS series “American Masters” and can be watched in it entirety here.

Two other films about photographers were Oscar-nominated.  I’ve already raved about Finding Vivian Mayer here, and I’m just slightly more reserved about Salt of the Earth (MC-83, NFX), which celebrates the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.  Directed by his son Juliano, with the collaboration of Wim Wenders, it follows his career from the time he transitioned from being an economist at the World Bank to recording, in lustrous black & white images of haunted beauty, the effects of underdevelopment and forced migration on desperate populations, from gold mining in Brazil to genocide in Africa.  Working closely with his wife, he’s put together a number of massive books, as he’s gone from a hippie type, with long blond locks and beard, to more the look of a Buddhist monk, sculpted head shaved except for bushy white eyebrows.  Having had his fill of human misery in various war zones, he eventually turned to nature photography, and the massive project of re-foresting his family’s plantation in Brazil.  He seems a very admirable character, but Wenders lays on the admiration a bit thick.  Otherwise this is must-see imagery.

I also watched one more documentary on photography worthy of note.  Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (MC-67, NFX) not only details the career of the architectural photographer Shulman, but offers a useful primer on the development of the Modernist movement in architecture.

Shifting gears, I recommend two documentaries on important public health issues.  Alive Inside (MC-67, NFX) deals with Alzheimer’s, urging the use of familiar music to unlock the prison of memory loss for many otherwise hopeless nursing home patients.  In Best Kept Secret (MC-100, NFX), director Samantha Buck follows a dedicated teacher in a special needs school in Newark NJ, as she tries to prepare her autistic or otherwise-challenged students for a more independent life after school.

Maybe you have as little interest in ice hockey as I do.  Maybe you’ve never heard of Slava Fetisov.  Maybe you think Red Army (MC-82, NFX) is not a documentary that you want to see.  You might be wrong about that – as I was.  With lively and canny direction from Gabe Polsky, this film follows Fetisov from his early recruitment for the Red Army hockey team, skating past its shocking Miracle on Ice defeat by the USA-USA-USA! in the 1980 Olympics, to its subsequent decade of dominance of international play, and then with the fall of the Soviet Union, its re-constitution as the NHL champion Detroit Red Wings.  Their remarkable play, even to a non-fan such as myself, is a thing of beauty, and the film builds to a surprise conclusion, as Fetisov returns to Russia as Minister of Sport under Putin.  All this was news to me, and very interesting both from a sporting point of view and as a window on four decades of change in Russia, from the Cold War to resurgent Slavic nationalism.  This documentary is inventive and engaging in ways I never imagined.

Happy Valley (MC-76, NFX) is a sport-themed documentary that did not connect with me as much.  It tells the unhappy story of Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, and Penn State football.  The long-delayed revelation of Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys led to the beloved Joe Pa’s firing and subsequent death, and the iconoclastic removal of his statue from the stadium, but the insane intensity of football passion continues at Penn State, despite shame and disqualification.  As a portrait of sports madness, which I have been known to share in certain cases, this film leaves me cold, and I didn’t find out anything I needed to know about this trial and its consequences.  At best, I take note of it, without recommendation.  

On the other hand, I definitely do recommend the documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (MC-88, NFX, PBS).  I’m not always a fan of the well-established Ken Burns style, but here he has a wealth of surprising footage with which to tell his story, about the many connections between Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, so there was a continuous stream of things I didn’t know and hadn’t seen, about characters I thought I knew going in.  The sheer slow-moving duration of Burns’ filmmaking seems warranted in this case.

I found Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (MC-81, NFX, HBO) less engrossing, still of some interest on account of Lawrence Wright’s always-persuasive journalism, but overlong and undeveloped as a film.  It does serve as a telling nonfiction counterpart to P.T. Anderson’s The Master.

Actress (MC-76, NFX) is a small but fairly engaging documentary about a supporting player in The Wire, who gave up acting to move upstate, along the Hudson, and raise her children, only to find that she longed to return to stage or screen.  Robert Greene’s film follows Brandy Burre as she moves toward re-starting her career, and has some fun with the enactment of real life by an inveterate actress, in a funhouse series of reflections, exploring aspects of performance and role-playing.

For me, Merchants of Doubt (MC-70, NFX) was preaching to the converted when it explored the methods of climate change deniers, and other corporate shills who cast doubts on the scientific consensus, so of course I found it persuasive.  Some of the fact-fakers are startling candid about their methods, and Robert Kenner’s film shows how the whole movement ramified from the playbook developed by the cigarette companies to deny the known health risks of smoking.  They unfold the secrets of appealing to the long-ingrained American antagonism toward pointy-headed, outsider experts telling us how to live our lives.  The film is hardly shocking, though certainly cogent, with a few unnecessary flourishes, but basically well-done.

This is not my last word on documentaries of the past year, but it’s enough for now.