Austin Film Festival Tuesday
Documentaries full of empathy, obvious contempt, and others that can't make up their mind
The Wild And Wonderful Whites Of West Virginia
Article Tools
The best documentaries are typically either sympathetic profiles on the personal lives of fascinating characters (The King Of Kong; Anvil!: The Story Of Anvil) or unflinching, journalistic essays that offer heretofore unexplored angles on a narrowly specific time period, person, or event (The Fog Of War; anything by the Maysles).
William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe—the debut feature from co-directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler—happens to be both. That they share a name isn't a coincidence: The two are daughters of famed civil rights-turned-criminal defense attorney William Kunstler, whose clients included Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven, the American Indian Movement members who overtook Wounded Knee, and the prisoners at the Attica riots. Given the filmmakers’ relationship to the subject, there a lot of first-person statements throughout the film, and talking heads frequently address the women directly, rather than speaking to the audience or the camera—as in talking about Kunstler’s work in terms of what “your father” did or felt. This actually works to its advantage, lending the film a very intimate feel as it attempts to explore both who Kunstler was and how his daughters actually feel about his transition from his ’60s-era accomplishments to a less philanthropic second act career defending rapists, terrorists, and cop-killers in the ’80s and ’90s, and striking a balance between natural empathy and clear-eyed investigative journalism that’s the best of both documentary worlds.
And as any student of documentaries knows, too much empathy for a subject can be poisonous—which is why we worried aloud in our AFF preview that Barry Levinson’s documentary about celebrity involvement in politics, PoliWood, “could be embarrassingly earnest and self-congratulatory.” Fortunately it sidesteps that worst-case scenario. Levinson himself describes PoliWood as a “film essay,” in which he seeks the answer to the age-old conundrum: “How do you survive the media circus and not end up the clown?” While attending the 2008 Democratic and Republican conventions with members of the Creative Coalition, a supposedly nonpartisan advocacy group comprising filmmakers and actors (including Spike Lee, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Daly), Levinson reminds us that he is, after all, the guy who made Wag The Dog, and as such he knows a thing or two about the blurring of politics and celebrity. Although he doesn’t set out to embarrass his Hollywood friends, it’s clear that some are more savvy and self-aware than others: Hathaway is particularly sharp and conscious of her limitations, while token conservative Stephen Baldwin can’t help but come off as a deluded oaf even in his brief appearance. Levinson argues that our country’s political process has become nearly indistinguishable from a Miss America pageant, and while that may not be the most original thesis, he backs it up with good humor and a potent array of imagery from the most recent presidential campaign.
It would be tempting to call James Allen Smith’s documentary Floored quietly contemptuous of its subjects, but more accurately, it’s merely detached by necessity. Who among us has not channel-surfed past CNBC or some other financial network, caught a glimpse of that seething mass of sweaty humanity shouting and madly gesticulating from the pit of a trading floor and briefly pondered, “Who are these assholes?” Smith does his damnedest to answer that question and make sense of this chaotic pit of capitalism while tracing the decline of “open outcry” trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as the popularity of computer trading continues to grow. Not surprisingly, what he discovers is that those assholes are, well, sort of assholes: Judging by Floored, the brokerage industry seems to be populated almost exclusively by greedy, balding douchebags who think they’re in a David Mamet play. (One testosterone-poisoned cigar-chomper takes us on a tour of his trophy room full of mounted and stuffed big game from Africa, confiding that the last time he felt true happiness was “when I got charged by that rhino.”) And although Smith is empathetic to the plight of these men left behind by the digital revolution, most of them can’t help but come off like high-school jocks, pissed that the nerds are taking their lunch money.
