Exit Through The Gift Shop: It’s hard to write about Exit Through The Gift Shop, or do it justice without revealing many of its twists and turns. That’s a damned shame, because so much of what makes legendarily secretive street artist Banksy’s directorial debut such a hoot is its unpredictability. The trippy art world satire begins with a loopy post-modern premise. In Gift Shop, an eccentric, street art loving Frenchman named Thierry Guetta set out to make a documentary about a new breed of artists who scrawl their masterpieces on walls and overpasses and nabbed the Holy Grail of street art fans when he hooked up with Banksy, a legendary graffiti artist whose identity remains a mystery to the general public. Twist 1: Banksy decided that Thierry is much more interesting than himself and decides to make a documentary about his ostensible chronicler. Twist 2: Thierry isn’t a documentarian or filmmaker so much as he’s a male groupie for the artists he loves with a pathological need to film everything he sees.
Exit Through The Gift Shop takes us deep inside the world of street artists like Banksy, who is seen only in shadows and speaks through a voice distorter yet still gets all of the film’s funniest lines and sharpest observations, and Shepard Fairey, who went from underground hero to mainstream superstar when his riff on a Associated Press photograph of Barak Obama became perhaps the President’s defining piece of iconography. Again, I’m hesitant to give away too much because I want you to enjoy the film (Mild SPOILER alert) as much as I did so I’ll just enigmatically say that Thierry makes the leap from idiosyncratic chronicler of street art to creator of street art and, after a slow start, Gift Shop becomes a simultaneously hilarious and trenchant exploration of the intersection of art, commerce and hype. So, is Thierry ultimately a modern-day Andy Warhol or a charlatan? Banksy’s film suggests the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Grade: B+
Holy Rollers: When I was eleven years old I spent a Summer or two at camp called Gan Israel run by Hassidic ultra-Orthodox Jews. I couldn’t be more secular but I found the Lubavitchers’ warm, inclusive sense of community awfully seductive. I envied the sense of purpose that comes with waking up every morning knowing I was living my life in full accordance with God’s laws. It’s that comforting sense of community that’s missing from Holy Rollers, an underwhelming, flatly shot drama about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Ecstasy smuggling ring inspired by actual events.
Kevin Asch’s depressingly wan feature-length directorial debut captures the negative aspects of Orthodox Judaism—the rules and restrictions, the dogmas and prohibitions—but not the sense of rapture that comes with fierce religious devotion. In a performance that tweaks his doe-eyed, adorable man-child persona ever so slightly, Jesse Eisenberg plays a young Orthodox Jew whose buttoned-down life gets turned upside down when he’s lured into smuggling Ecstasy.
The drug trade appeals to Eisenberg’s hesitance to pursue the life his family has mapped out for him and his innate business savvy and it isn’t long until Eisenberg trades in a life of study and prayer for clubbing and recruiting mules of his own. Caught between worlds, Eisenberg abandons his faith and, in the ultimate act of religious heresy, cuts off his payot. If Holy Rollers paints a dour, unappealing portrait of Orthodox Judaism it’s equally harsh in its portrayal of a curiously joyless and depressing club scene. Since Eisenberg never seems that connected to his family or community his betrayal never has much resonance. Asch steers clear of the culture-clash comedy seemingly endemic in the film’s premise but doesn’t have much to say about the conflict between the secular and the profane either. Holy Rollers is ultimately a big shrug of a movie, a maddening underachiever that wastes a promising premise and a perfectly cast but hamstrung lead.