Documentaries galore

reviewed Jan 2005

To Be and to Have (Ètre et avoir) will be of interest primarily to anyone who's ever yearned to know what it's like to go to a small village school in France.  If you're curious, it immerses you in the experience.  If, like me, you don't particularly care, you'll wonder what the fuss is about.  I lost interest fairly quickly, though I dutifully kept watching for another hour or so before I became permanently distracted.  It's almost tediously intimate, minutely observing schoolyard disputes, the teaching of fractions, the teacher counseling his students, the confusion of parents trying to help their son with his homework (a funny scene that ends with four or five adults clustered around the boy, puzzling over his math problems and arguing about the answers).  As slice of life, it's well done, but your interest in seeing it should depend wholly on your interest in this life, not on any cinematic merit.


Similarly, Hell's Highway lost my interest because it didn't seem to be going anywhere.  It's about the 1950s driver education films with titles like Wheels of Tragedy that featured footage of gruesome, real-life crashes to, er, drive home the need for safe driving.  It's interesting at first, as the pioneering makers of these films talk about how they worked with police departments to be notified of crashes, then raced to the scene to film, sometimes arriving before the paramedics did.  But after a while, it's just more of the same -- more stories about filming an accident scene and more graphic footage of dying victims.  I guess I was expecting something kitschier, along the lines of those '50s etiquette shorts familiar to Mystery Science Theater 3000 viewers.  These graphic movies had lost favor by the time I took drivers ed; the films I remember were more elliptical, with a jump cut to startled faces and spinning tires, then screeching, and finally a crumpled car.  The only thing that clearly stuck with me was advice for pedestrians on the importance of crossing only at marked intersections and after looking both ways -- although pedestrians always have the right of way, the narrator grimly advised, "don't be... dead right."  Screeeeeeech, cut to body lying in the road, covered by a sheet.


Touching the Void is a documentary that plays more like a TV show, in that it's mainly talking heads and reenactments.  But the story is compelling enough that it makes for gripping viewing nonetheless.  At its core a survival story, as mountain climber Joe Simpson, left for dead after a brutal fall on Peru's Siula Grande peak, struggles to crawl to safety, it also raises tormenting questions -- Simon Yates, Joe's partner, is the one who leaves him for dead, and implicit throughout the movie is:  What would you do?  Would you be able to leave your partner to die (both men agree it was the only rational option)?  Would you be physically and mentally strong enough to save yourself if you were in Joe's position (or in Simon's, for that matter)?  It's an amazing story, all the more so for Joe's calm, frank narration of his ordeal and the way both men survived the nightmare and its aftermath.


Looking for Richard is an Al Pacino ego trip disguised as an exploration of Shakespeare's Richard III.  Pacino discusses the play with Shakespeare experts and fellow actors, then performs scenes with a hodgepodge of thespians, including Alec Baldwin and an as-yet-unknown Kevin Spacey.  Of all the people who appear in the movie, including the random ones on the street who are asked what they know about the play, Pacino seems to be the only one aware of the camera -- not only is he aware of it, he's fond of speaking directly into the lens, coming off like a creepy, over-earnest guy at a party who really, really wants you know how Shakespeare changed his life, communicating the depth of his feeling by locking onto you with an intense, unwavering gaze and relentlessly advancing on you until you back up into a wall.  Since he's not physically present in my room, though, it just comes off as pretentious and silly.  The acted scenes are fine -- again, Pacino overdoes it -- but I'll take Ian McKellen's Richard III any day.  I learned a bit about the play from Looking for Richard, but nothing I couldn't have gotten from Cliff Notes.

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