Movie Review: American Dharma

American Dharma **** / *****

Directed by: Errol Morris.

Errol Morris’ American Dharma is essentially a feature length interview with Steve Bannon – the former head of Breitbart, who became a senior Trump adviser, before getting himself fired. Bannon stands for everything that the left hates about Donald Trump – he is racist and xenophobic, he tosses out fiery rhetoric, and stories that have little to no basis in reality. He claims to be on the side of the little men – while being fabulously wealthy himself, having attended all the Universities they know hold in contempt – and when they achieve power, they focus on getting a tax break for the wealthy, that will do little to nothing to help all those little men. He is, in essence, all of the things people hate about Trump personified in one hateful package. And Morris lets him talk and talk and talk for 90 minutes in American Dharma – and apparently, Bannon is quite happy with how the film came out. It was his idea after all – having been a fan of Morris’ The Fog of War – he wanted the same basic treatment.

 

Many see the fact that it lets Bannon talk – and his apparent happiness with the result – as proof that Morris was played – that he “lost” the interview with Bannon, and further proof that the left shouldn’t try to debate people like Bannon – but essentially to stop giving them a platform to spew their hatred at all. It that’s the way you feel, then nothing I can say will make you change your mind – make you see this movie, or not hate it if you do. But I don’t think Morris “lost” this interview with Bannon – mainly because I don’t think Morris ever really tries to “win” these interviews. Morris’ strategy – with everyone from the Holocaust denying inventor or death penalty devices in Mr. Death, to Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, to Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known, to the soldiers at Guantanamo in Standard Operating to Procedure and everyone else he has ever interviewed – is to basically give them enough rope to hang themselves with, and to undermine them as they do so with the visuals Morris so famously cuts those interviews with.

 

The framing device in American Dharma is basically Bannon talking about the movie he loves – from 12 O’clock High to the cinema of John Wayne – and Morris lets Bannon talk about these films, while at the same time showing us clips of those films. Sometimes, they underline what Bannon is saying – but others it undermines them (Bannon talking about The Searchers, seemingly unaware that Wayne’s character there is a racist for example). Later in the film, when Bannon tries to defend himself and Trump against allegations of racism, Morris simply shows us a ton of headlines that prove the opposite, a tactic he uses again and again, no matter what the topic is. Morris makes it clear where he stands on everything – while he never does the verbal evisceration that audiences on the left seem to want him to do on Bannon.

 

This is all part of Morris’ methodology, and while you can critique it, I think it’s an interesting and valuable one. How many times have we seen headlines about how John Olivier, Samantha Bee or other (mostly great) late comedians have “eviscerated” or “destroyed” Trump or one of his cronies? Have any of them actually stopped Trump? They are, in essence, preaching to the choir when they do those shows.

 

Morris is doing something different here. American Dharma is essentially a cinematic Rorschach test – and what you think of Bannon going in will color what you think of him coming out. And yet, Morris also makes it abundantly clear just what he thinks of Bannon – he just does it in a different way – perhaps a way that may actually have a chance to reach a wider audience. Probably not, but the other way hasn’t worked. And at least here, we get to hear everything straight from Bannon’s own mouth – and judge him accordingly.

Movie Review: Wormwood

Wormwood **** / *****

Directed by: Errol Morris.

Written by: Kiernan Fitzgerald & Steven Hathaway & Molly Rokosz.

Starring: Peter Sarsgaard (Frank Olson).

 

Errol Morris is 69 years old, an age when many filmmakers would be resting on their laurels, either retired, or just repeating themselves. But Morris, who is one of the greatest documentary filmmakers in history, who pretty much re-invented the genre with The Thin Blue Line (1988) (which is arguably, not even his best film) isn’t one of those filmmakers. His latest film, Wormwood, takes what he has done in his career, and pushes it into even bolder territory. It’s not a perfect film – it’s too long, it repeats itself, and some parts in the middle seem to get close to indulging in crazy conspiracy theories (instead of the regular old weird conspiracy theories of the rest of the film) – but it’s thrilling to see a filmmaker like Morris attempt something as bold as this, at this stage of his career.

 

The film focuses on the death of Frank Olson – a government scientist, who worked on some very secret projects, with various organizations within the government. In 1953, Olson died after he fell out of a hotel window, and crashed to the pavement below. Or did he jump? Or was he thrown? The government tried to remain quiet on these questions for decades – but in 1975, it released their official explanation – that Olson was among those who they tested the drug LSD – which they invented – on. The drug interacted with Olson’s mental issues, and history of depression, and perhaps led him to his death by suicide. For most, this is the end of the story – the government admits wrongdoing, but not too much, and an embarrassing mystery is solved. But for Eric Olson, Frank’s son, it is just the beginning. Eric has spent more than 60 years trying to find out all he can about his father’s death – the men he worked for, the work he was doing, and why some in the government may have wanted Frank Olson dead. Is this a far bigger conspiracy then anyone could have imagined?

 

Morris himself has admitted the film is something of a greatest hits package for him – combining elements of many of his films, into one mammoth package. The film is 241 minutes long – it’s playing in a few theaters, but most will watch it as I did, on Netflix, where they separated it out into 6 parts (I watched them in a row, in one big binge – I usually hate binge watching, but the breaks here seem arbitrary, and the film is a large whole). There are, of course, elements of The Thin Blue Line here, with its look at true crime, and re-enactments. But here, Morris pushes those re-enactments even further – casting Peter Sarsgaard as Frank Olson, and a host of other recognizable faces – Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, Scott Shepherd, etc. – as the people in his life leading up to his death. These re-enactments, return – again and again (and again and again and again) to that hotel room, and what may or may not have happened there. Yes, all this does become repetitive at some point, but also underlines the obsession of Eric Olson about his father’s death (how many times has his mind returned to that hotel room?). Eric Olson is a classic Morris subject – obsessive in the same way that the people in say Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997) are – but he simply cannot let it go.

 

The final episode (in Netflix terms) was for me the strongest of the film. The film does a great job in the first couple of hours of giving us all sorts of background into the government, and their various projects – the LSD project, that Frank Olson was apparently a guinea pig in, to the biological weapons Eric is convinced his dad knew about – and wanted to expose (this dovetails nicely with Morris’ own fascinating with government secrets and lies, as seen in The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure or The Unknown Known). It flags a little bit in its third hour, as it starts to repeat itself, or chasing down even wilder tales. But in the final hour, Morris does something fascinating. First, he does bring on a respected, veteran journalist, who while he cannot quite confirm Olson’s theory of his father, won’t refute it either – saying that he has a source, that gave him some information – but there is no way for him to reveal that information, without exposing, and thus, endangering that source. But then Morris pushes Eric even further, essentially asking him if all this obsession was worth it, and even if he could prove it all, what would it really change? At this point, the death is more than 60 years old – no one is ever going to be held accountable for it. And in the meantime, Eric has essentially given up everything else in his life, to chase this down. It’s a question that doesn’t get asked enough in docs like this, and it’s to Eric Olson’s credit that he has the self-awareness to answer in the way he does. It’s here where the film gets its title from – it’s all Wormwood, it’s all bitter.

Movie Review: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography *** / *****

Directed by: Errol Morris.

 

It takes until the final half hour or so of Errol Morris’ The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography before Morris and his subject explain the title of the film. Dorfman is a photographer, who spent the majority of her career working with a large scale Polaroid camera, producing large, not quite life size photos. While she shot many famous people over the years – including her good friend Allan Ginsberg – the B-Sides of the title refers to her work where, for years, she took portraits for regular people. She always took two photos – the people got one, and she kept the “reject” – or The B-Side. In the last half hour or so of the documentary, Dorfman and Morris go through many of these photographs, and wonder why the people chose the other picture – the picture they don’t have. In some cases, it’s obvious – in others, who knows. It’s this section that really makes The B-Side worth seeing – as it really does continue Morris’ exploration of images and truth – and what they tell about each other. The rest of the doc is fine – but it’s clear from the beginning that Morris and Dorfman are friends – and so the interrogator that Morris can be is not on display here. It’s not that Dorfman requires the kind of prodding that the like of Fred Lechter Jr., Robert McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld have gotten in front of Morris’ camera – just that because they’re so friendly, Morris barely seems to push Dorfman at all – and as a result, I’m not quite sure her work is given its full due in the documentary.

 

For the first 45 minutes or so (this is a short documentary – barely hitting 75 minutes, although I couldn’t help but think that an ever shorter doc would have been better) has Dorfman telling her life story to Morris – from her short stint in New York, where she worked in a book store, and where she first met Ginsberg and others like him – to her return to her hometown in Massachusetts, where she became a teacher. It wasn’t until she was in her 20s that she was handed a camera – and discovered her life’s passion. Eventually, she’ll discover the camera she loves – the large scale Polaroid – and never look back. She had to make a living – had to pay the rent on her studio space, had to the pay for the expensive film, etc. – which is why she started with the portrait photography anyway. While she took pictures of famous people, for the most part she didn’t – it was normal people. She had a gallery show once, and didn’t much like it. She’s one of those people who seems comfortable in her own skin, doing what she wants to do – regardless of whether or not anyone else cares.

 

The film feels like a rather surface level look at Dorfman and her life – her memories of her parents, her marriage and her son, are all talked about, but never in any sort of depth. Perhaps this was by design by Morris – Dorfman does say in the documentary after all that she isn’t really interested in the inner lives of those she photographs – she wants to capture the surface, how they project themselves to the world. Perhaps that’s all Morris wants to do here. The film is much more laid back than anything else I’ve ever seen by Morris – he doesn’t use his infamous camera The Interrtron – on Dorfman ‘preferring instead a more casual conversation in her studio, where she can show him his work.

 

The B-Side feels like a minor work for Morris – something he wanted to make because he loves Dorfman and her work, and in making the film, he can bring it to a wider audience. So be it – if that’s his purpose, than he achieves his goal. Yet, I cannot help but think that Morris is perhaps too close to Dorfman to realize that he either didn’t have enough material here to make a feature film here – or at least his approach to Dorfman didn’t yield it. It’s still a fine film – but Morris is one of the best documentary filmmakers ever – and this just doesn’t rise to the level of his best work – or even come close to it.

Movie Review: The Unknown Known

The Unknown Known
Directed by: Errol Morris.

Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known makes an interesting companion piece to his Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War. That film, which came out on the eve of the War in Iraq, was a feature length interview with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara – the architect of the Vietnam War. In the 30 years that had passed between McNamara’s involvement in the war, and the interview with Morris, he had a lot of time to reflect on what happened – what went wrong and his own culpability in that. McNamara may not have been overly apologetic, but he was intelligent, thoughtful and had the ability to admit at least some his mistakes.

Now comes The Unknown Known, which takes the same approach as The Fog of War, except this time with Donald Rumsfeld – one of the architects of the war in Iraq. The film isn’t nearly as enlightening as The Fog of War was – and this probably because of two reasons – first, that not as much time has passed between Iraq and the interview, and second, and more importantly, Donald Rumsfeld is not as open as McNamara was. He deflects Morris’ questions, hides behind semantics and when Morris catches him in either a lie, or a misstatement of facts, Rumsfeld simply tells another lie, or laughs it off.

Through the course of the movie, you can tell Morris is becoming frustrated. He, of course, invented the infamous Interrotron, which allows his interview subjects to look directly at him and into the camera at the same time – as well as having the ability to throw up other information on a screen for the interview subject to read. This results in a much more direct communication between the subject being interviewed and the audience. For the most part, Morris likes to remain silent in his movie – he isn’t Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock who thrusts themselves to the forefront of his movies – if he ever even appears on camera in one of them, I cannot recall it. He prefers to let his subject communicate directly with the audience. During the course of The Unknown Known however, we hear Morris’ voice far more often than usual. This is for a very simple reason – he knows Rumsfeld is lying to him, and he cannot sit there and let those lies go unchallenged.

The movie, therefore, does not really offer much new insight into the war in Iraq. Amazingly, Rumsfeld still feels content to tow the Bush party line on almost every issue, saying things that we all know are blatantly untrue – but damn it, he’s sticking to it. But it does offer an interesting portrait of Rumsfeld himself. This is a man who issued thousands of memos during his time as Defense Secretary – most of them now public – and Morris gets him to read some of them. The title comes from one such memo, where Rumsfeld details the differences between “known knowns” (things we know we know), known unknown (things we know we don’t know), unknown unknowns (things we don’t know we don’t know) and unknown knowns (things we know, but don’t know we know, or perhaps it’s the other way around – like with everything else, Rumsfeld doesn’t hesitate to change his mind whenever it suits him).

The portrait that emerges in The Unknown Known is that of a person who doesn’t seem to be bothered by just how badly things went in Iraq. Morris is obsessed with the details, and what went wrong, and why, but Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to care that much. He smiles, he laughs it off and basically tells Morris he’s too obsessed with this stuff. The film ventures back to the past to go over Rumsfeld’s political career – from his time in Congress, to working for Nixon and Ford, to the moment he loses out on being Reagan’s running mate to George Bush Sr. (this seems like the only moment that bugs him – although he doesn’t give Morris much more than a grim look). Rumsfeld basically skated through his time in politics – seemingly missed every scandal. He wasn’t much trusted by those around him – they know he was mainly self-serving -  but he was always a safe choice. Morris is never quite able to crack Rumsfeld – never able to get under his skin, to see who he really is behind the face he has shown over his political career. That makes The Unknown Known not among Morris’ best work, because normally he’s able to do that. But he can’t crack Rumsfeld. Maybe the reason is there’s nothing really to crack. What you see is what you get.

 
Note: I saw The Unknown Known at TIFF 2013, and as far as I know, nothing has changed since then. It is being released in New York and LA this week as part of an Oscar qualifying run – although since it didn’t make the documentary shortlist last week (although it should have), that doesn’t really matter. I’m sure the film will go wider at some point – Errol Morris is one of the few documentary filmmakers who can pretty much guarantee some sort of release of his films.

DVD Review: Tabloid

Tabloid ****

Directed by: Errol Morris.

Errol Morris is more interested in how people process reality – how they see themselves – than the objective truth. And he finds such fascinating subjects for his documentaries. From the people who run and patronize the pet cemetery in his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven, to the quartet of strange people trying to control the uncontrollable in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1996), to Fred A. Lechter in Mr. Death (1999), about a man who designed machines to put people to death, who was ostracized for being a Holocaust denier, what Morris really wants to know is how these people see themselves. He was criticized by some for The Fog of War, his Oscar winning 2003 documentary, about Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, for not providing more context. And again criticized for his Standard Operating Procedure (2006) about the Abu Ghrhaib prisoner abuse scandal, for concentrating on the grunts on the ground, rather than their higher ups. I didn’t share those views. Morris doesn’t need to provide context to the Vietnam War, which is well documented, and it is safe to assume anyone who wanted to see a movie about Robert McNamara knows enough about it to put what he says in context. And he hardly comes across very well in Morris’ movie. And if you want to see a movie that blames the Bush administration for its handling of the War on Terror, you have about 1,000 to choose from. What interested Morris in that film was the pictures themselves – why the soldiers did what they did, and why the photographed it.

His new film Tabloid may just be the most entertaining film he has ever made – and also one of the most maddening, as we never really feel like we’re getting the truth. This is Morris’ point, I think. He is more fascinated with how Joyce McKinney sees herself, and tells her story (and she is a great storyteller) then the whole truth, which will probably never be known because McKinney is the only one talking.

To hear McKinney tell it, she was just a regular, Southern Gal from North Carolina. A beauty queen – a contestant in Miss USA one year. She moves to Utah, and one day locks eyes on the love of her life Kirk Anderson. They fall madly in love, and plan to marry, even though his family disapproves of her. Then one day, Kirk simply vanishes. He doesn’t leave a note, he doesn’t call, he doesn’t take his stuff. He’s just gone. She hires of Private Investigator, who takes a few years to track Kirk down in England. McKinney hires a bodyguard and a pilot, and brings along her friend KJ May to England, where she convinces Kirk to leave the cult that has a hold of him, and whisks him away to a cottage in the English countryside for three days of “fun, food and sex”. She was still a virgin, but gave herself up to help poor Kirk, reeling from religious indoctrination. She ties him to the bed to help him relax. After a weekend that she describes as a honeymoon, they return to London to get legally married. They see a newspaper says Kirk has been kidnapped, so he sets off to set the record straight. The next thing Joyce knows, she’s been arrested for kidnapping and rape (which is ridiculous she says, a woman can’t rape a man it would be like “putting a marshmallow in a parking meter”). Kirk is back in the hands of his cult, and they are making him say all these terrible things about her. The tabloid press is all over this bizarre story, and Joyce has become the center of the universe.

Morris, of course, finds people who contradict McKinney’s story. Anderson was hardly the man of anyone’s dreams, but a hulking, pudgy man with little charm or personality. He didn’t belong to a cult, and he didn’t really disappear into thin air. He was a Mormon, who like all young Mormons, was sent to do his Mission work. The bodyguard McKinney brought to England bailed when they landed, because McKinney and May were hiding surveillance equipment. The pilot, Jackson Shaw (interviewed here) bailed when he discovers they are packing chloroform and fake gun. And of course, Anderson claimed he has drugged and taken to the cottage, where he was shackled to the bed and forced into having sexual intercourse with McKinney for three days.

You can see why this story so fascinated the Tabloid press in England, notoriously much worse than in America. The dubbed the “Manacled Mormon” case, and set about to find everything they could about McKinney – who seems to be loving the attention the case brings her. That is, until they unearth some not so flattering things about her, and then the Tabloids are horrid people, who do nothing but lie. McKinney spends much of her time in front on Morris’ famed Interrotron (a camera that shoots the interviewer looking directly into the camera, but also allows them to look Morris directly in the eye), denying all the stuff that was written about her. She has been working on an autobiography for years now, to set the record straight. Although it’s harder now because much of her documentation was stolen from her car. If you think that’s hard to believe, you also have to admit it’s just as hard to believe that the entire file containing the pornographic pictures of McKinney, that she claims were faked, also completely disappeared from the files of the Daily Mirror.

In his review, Roger Ebert mentioned Rashomon when talking about Tabloid and the comparison makes sense. I don’t believe that McKinney is lying when she tells her story. She believes every word she is saying. But is it the truth? We’ll never know. Three people were in that cottage – KJ May is dead, Kirk Anderson has never told his side of the story to anyone other than the police (and he refused Morris’ request for an interview). So that leaves Joyce McKinney, who is self aggrandizing, obsessed with her “crazy love story” with Kirk, and in the words of one of the reporters “barking mad”. She is also one of the fascinating people you will see in any movie this year.