Reality and its alternatives

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is not only a contender for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards this Sunday, but is being hailed as re-writing the entire concept of documentary, of being a complete breakthrough in the form.

I can only conclude that the people who write this sort of thing don't see many documentaries. The novelty of Exit is that a documentary was begun on one subject, but the effort was diverted into a different direction. This happened to Errol Morris, who began a film on "Dr. Death", James Grigson, an "expert" whose testimony was always tied to death penalty prosecutions. This led him to the story of the wrongful prosecution of Randall Dale Adams, and Morris's Thin Blue Line helped secure Adams a retrial and acquittal. Les Blank intended to create a "making of" film about Fitzcarraldo, but his resulting film, Burden of Dreams became about how the director, Werner Herzog turned into the victim of his own obsessions, and wound up being more interesting than Fitzcarraldo.

The point is that real documentary filmmakers change course all the time, because the footage dictates what the film will be. (Television documentaries are an exception, as they are tightly controlled and budgeted and may even be shot to a script.) No one is surprised when a novel or play turns out differently than the author intended, but somehow this is radically startling in documentary film.

Exit is a little different in that it is not clearly established who is controlling the film. There is no director, although one has to suspect Banksy, the renegade graffiti artist, as the guiding hand. The film was originally intended to be a portrait of Banksy and his work to be shot and directed by an indefatigable video shooter named Theirry Guetta, who in time aided and abetted street artists in their technically illegal pranks. Guetta shot a great deal of high-quality material but delivered a film that was an incomprehensible non-narrative stream of flash cutting; interesting for a few minutes, but headache-inducing thereafter. Banksy decided he needed to seize control of the project and suggested that Guetta himself became an artist.

Guetta evidently became an artist the way a film producer does -- by hiring people to execute his vision, and trying to assemble it into a gallery show in imitation of Banksy. Even though it was unoriginal and organized in a slapdash fashion by loyal employees who realized that Guetta was incompetent or distracted, it became a huge hit and Guetta is today a successful "artist."

It is hard to say what any of this means. That genuine grass-roots creativity can be seized upon by entrepreneurs and transformed into product? That street art is itself a hoax? Or that it is both art and hoax at the same time? In any event, none of these revelations are earth-shattering, nor is any of the filmmaking. It is a perfectly good assemblage of what was reportedly a staggering amount of unsorted footage, but it does not write a new chapter in documentary. The most remarkable thing is what a charming impression Banksy makes, though his face is obscured and his voice distorted throughout.

The strangest thing about Exit is the number of people who assume that it's story is a fake. It's both too credible and too eccentric to be fake. For an example of a fake story in a fake documentary, one can turn to I'm Still Here (2010), although I don't recommend doing so. This was the film around which Joaquin Phoenix and director Casey Affleck concocted the fabricated story that Phoenix was retiring from acting in order to become a hip-hop artist, despite never having displayed any talent in that direction prior thereto. The entertainment news media reacted with the hoped-for consternation, while David Letterman managed to have some fun at Phoenix's expense. That encounter proved, among other things, that Phoenix lacked the ability and experience in improvisation that might have made this experiment work. This is the kind of thing that Christopher Guest or Harry Shearer or somewhat of that ilk can carry off without batting an eye, but Phoenix was clearly stumped. (He even felt the necessity to apologize for this appearance a year later, but he should have apologized for the film as well.)



The problem is that Affleck and Phoenix not only lack the skill, but the courage and conviction to pull this idea off. There is a choice here-- one can either use the documentary form as a narrative frame and style within which to construct a fictitious world and story, as in The Office television series, This Is Spinal Tap and the rest of the Christopher Guest movies. Or one can commit completely to a prank (see Banksy above), as in Candid Camera, Punk'd and Pauly Shore's entire career. But the makers of I'm Still Here tried to have it no way and both ways.

Phoenix's character (also named Joaquin Phoenix, but clearly not the real Joaquin Phoenix) is surrounded by flunkies and sycophants who humor him in his insane whims. But they are not real flunkies and sycophants, but people associated with Phoenix and the film who are in on "the joke." Similarly, Sean Combs (appearing as "P Diddy") was made aware that Phoenix's hip-hop pretensions were not sincere, and he also lacks the acting chops to simulate the real confusion and horror that he would have felt upon being presented with Phoenix's incompetent creations to "co-produce." So the whole "fly-on-the-wall" and "catching people's candid reactions" only applies to Phoenix's recorded media appearances, which show up in clips in this film. In all the original footage shot by Affleck, the fix is on.

Even this might have been worthwhile if the film said anything or had anywhere to go. What it tells us is that celebrities are spoiled babies and have no idea what they're actually good at and why, and need people who will help them, not enable them. This is hardly worth sitting through 108 minutes -- yes, you read that right, over one and three-quarters hours, to find out. (At best they had about half the content they needed for this movie.) Anyway, I sat through it so you don't have to. You can leave your thanks in a comment below.

The sons of Norman Bates

The Killer Inside Me (2010) is entitled to film noir credentials due to its source material, a novel by Jim Thompson, perhaps the bleakest among celebrated hard-boiled writers. But the story takes place under a blistering Texas sun, and the film manages to feel like noir without ever looking like noir. Instead of moody shadows from overturned lamps or shiny wet pavements reflecting the streetlamps, we have the blank, affect-less face of Casey Affleck, an actor who, after Gone Baby Gone, is on his way to becoming his own hard-boiled genre.

Moreover, director Michael Winterbottom has a history of making films, most notably Tristram Shandy, which are about themselves. This may be more admirable than making films about other films; it is at least less derivative. So we are spelled the Brian DePalma-style quotes from better movies in favor of drilling deeper and deeper down into an empty man.

Is Lou Ford a sociopath or psychopath? Is he a seething volcano or a emptied-out husk? Neither Thompson nor Winterbottom seem to want to answer that question, but simply scatter random clues, especially about Lou's mother who apparently taught him to use women as punching bags. The film favors long takes with traveling cameras carefully displaying the spatial relationships among locations, and especially between cars and interiors, as if the film were being shot by a crime scene photographer. It is hard to make sense of the plot, for though it isn't complicated, the offered character motivations don't make much sense. And as if to throw up their hands in confusion with Affleck's polite and obsequious killer, a character A.O. Scott of the New York Times described as "Eddie Haskell on his way to strangle a puppy," the filmmakers do not let him escape as Thompson did, but leave him a self-started, but somewhat ambiguous housefire.

Lou Ford may just be the latest of nice young men who kill. I suppose the great-granddaddy of them all (aside from Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray) is probably Danny from Night Must Fall a twice-filmed Emlyn Williams play which feels in the theater as if it is two hours about nothing except whether or not there is a severed head in a hatbox. It set off a plethora of similar pleasant yet homicidal young men, culminating in Norman Bates (or was it his mother?). And Norman and his co-creator, Alfred Hitchcock established that most dangerous of rules of film in the post-Classical age: you can't trust anyone or anything.

Norman also set off some direct imitators in the first decade after his debut, such as Keir Dullea in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). My feelings about Otto Preminger seemed to have been shaped more by the public persona he used in the 50s and 60s to promote his movies; the Prussian tyrant director, forever purchasing expensive literary properties, cramming them with stars and making glacially-paced superproductions such as Exodus and Hurry Sundown. Now that I examine his work without the baggage of his publicity, I see an interesting use of space and a respect for actors. His films are theatrical but in the good way. Not theatrical meaning given to overacting and static cameras, but in the sense of framing the action broadly (in this case using the 2:35 proportions well), giving actors distance and room to establish characters and relationships, rather than using close-ups and editing to create a performance, and the use of long takes both to enhance those performances and to delineate the space among them and between different loci of action. Look at this clip and how clearly Preminger sets the relative statuses of the characters, the jockeying for control between Keir Dullea and Laurence Olivier and the precise layout of the school from which Bunny has disappeared.



(Production of this film was undoubtedly the inspiration of the observation by Noel Coward - who plays a supporting role - "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.")

Preminger's approach suggests a respect for his collaborators, especially the writers John and Penelope Mortimer (John Mortimer was most famous as the creator of Rumpole) and the actors; it contradicts the pose of the arrogant self-sufficient autocrat the Preminger projected. (Of course, the whole facade was a sham -- Preminger was not Teutonic, as he played in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, but an Austrian Jew.) Bad manners or not, Preminger lets things unfold, and in a swift efficient manner unlike most of his 1960s epics. In fact, it goes swiftly enough for most of the audience to have overlooked nice young Keir as the possible culprit in Bunny's disappearance. Most of the film is engaged in trying to suggest that Carol Lynley is mad.

Speaking of madness, Anthony Perkins, the original Norman Bates himself, got the tables turned on him in the game of "Who is Crazier" in Pretty Poison (1968) a pitch-black comedy variant of Lolita. Like, Killer Inside Me, it is a sunlit noir, here in a sun-dappled early New England autumn. Perkins, freshly paroled, seeks to seduce Tuesday Weld, here at the tail end of a 10-year period of playing prom queen types, with tales of being a secret agent under cover as a criminal and hints of involving her in his dangerous escapades. Perkins adds the wonderful quality of appearing to very possibly believe his own stories. Weld appears to succumb to his fabrications, even offering her own innocence; but that gift becomes a weapon, and in this scene she suggests they push their relationship to the next stage -- flight.



The would-be predator becomes the tool of the real predator, especially as Weld convinces Perkins to participate in the murder of her mother, played by B-movie icon, Beverly Garland (still alluring at 50). Lolita becomes Double Indemnity and the madness keeps spiraling up.

Pretty Poison has some nice visual flourishes beside the healthy-looking all-American countryside. The factory Perkins works in produces a chemical waste the color of blood, presaging the violence to come and echoing the fears of the then-emerging environmental movement. There is a multiplicity of viewing devices and lenses - binoculars, windows, an industrial lens at the plant, amplifying the sense of the male gaze on Weld's character. And the denouement is perfect, with Perkins pulling the pin of the grenade on himself, and Weld seeking out her next victim. It both recalls the femmes fatale of the 40s and suggests that Norman Bates was never as great a threat as Norma.