Zen Pulp: The World of Michael Mann, Pt. 3—I’m looking at you, miss: The women of Mann

By Matt Zoller Seitz

______________________________
This is the third in a five-part series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opened July 1. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. To read the author's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

Read more!

Gay Panic: Brüno and Humpday

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Sacha Baron Cohen's improvisational prank film Brüno is a conceptual mess that's satisfying as a lowball, turn-your-brain-off snot comedy, but deeply problematic as social commentary. It's this last aspect, unfortunately, that made 2006's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (and the character's original TV incarnation) an object of debate. Did Borat's interactions with prototypical dumb-ass Americans, and his stoking of anti-Semitic tendencies, critique the Arab world's cultural prejudice and expose the country's latent prejudice and paranoia, or merely invite smug liberal laughter and an unearned sense of cultural superiority? Was Borat a Rorschach test, or an admittedly mesmerizing comedian's clever way of indulging stereotypes while pretending to challenge them? And in total, was the movie a stinging critique of a fat, happy nation engaged in two distant wars against countries filled with Borat-types, or just a put-on faking relevance, the movie equivalent of a rubber chicken wrapped in a New York Times Op-Ed section?

The answer to each question was "Both."

_________________________________
To read the rest of the article at IFC.com, click here.

Read more!

Michael Bay Thinks You’re Stupid: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

by Eugene Ahn

It’s easy for critics and movie geeks to bash Michael Bay for making stupid movies. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of truth in Michael Bay’s assertions that he makes movies for “regular people.” And a large number of “regular” people, as well as film geeks and snobs, love stupid movies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a stupid movie, and when it comes to dumbed down action, Michael Bay is probably one of, if not THE best at creating a mindless action thriller and letting us revel in the testerone-filled orgy of explosions and chest thumping machismo that most of his fare offers. Hate the guy’s movies all you want, but it takes a respectable amount of chutzpah to pull off the immaculately idiotic Bad Boys II Cuba sequence with a straight face.

All that being said, I choose to bash Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen not because it’s a stupid movie (and don’t get me wrong, it’s plenty stupid), but because it’s concrete proof that Michael Bay thinks the audience is stupid. Clocking in at 150 minutes, every second is filled with the utter disdain Bay has for the audience’s level of intelligence. As if the plot was so complex that we couldn’t pick it up along the way, the script has the Autobots constantly talking to each other about what the Decepticons are trying to do, as well as Decepticons recounting what they are doing at that very second.

On top of that, Bay throws the U.S. military’s presence into the mix solely to have a reason for Sam and his cohorts to contact the NEST team, which leads to NEST contacting the Pentagon in an effort to update every move that the characters make. All this does is create an interminable echo chamber of redundant exposition that fills nearly every second of screen time where robots aren’t bashing each other’s heads in. Attention audience, you are simply too stupid to understand what is going on.

The obvious irony is that the story itself really doesn’t make much sense; a flaw that comes not from lack of exposition, but from inherent flaws with the script itself. At one point, there’s a shard of the Allspark, and then there’s the Matrix of Leadership, which is like the Allspark only it powers a machine that apparently destroys the Sun, which in turn would destroy the very planet that has the Energon that the Decepticons were killing humanity for. What? None of this makes sense, which is probably why Bay and team felt the need to constantly remind the audience of the immediate next step of the plot at regular intervals, to keep you so placated that you wouldn’t start to wonder how all of this fit together. (Answer: it doesn’t.)

I assume screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman could’ve tightened all this up with another script revision, but it’s pretty apparent that Bay assumed the action would be enough to satisfy most “regular” people. As a result, the movie is bloated with more action than it knows what to do with. And while most of the time you can trust Bay to at least deliver a good action scene, the sequences in Transformers 2 are average at best. It’s gotten to the point where even his explosions look the same, with bodies flying and geysers of dirt spraying up in multiple directions in a similar pattern through most of the film.

Bay's style of quick editing and fast camera whips, a callback to his days in music video/commercial directing, does manage to cobble together some form of stylistic pacing, but loses its effect by the first hour, as every action scene just starts to bleed into the other. Robots fight with guns. Robots fight with swords. Robots fly, robots dive, robots, robots, robots. There is something to be said about all things in moderation, which is something that Bay of course, doesn’t believe in.

In the end, the action is insulting not because it’s merely uninspired, but because it’s inherently lazy. You could spend the entire movie watching for a technically impressive shot, only to come back with a few scenes where Shia LaBeouf is running around in focus as some frenzied action takes place in the background. That seems impressive until you realize the background action is all CGI, which probably involved nothing more than Bay trying to cram as much action into any available space on the screen at every opportunity. And fill the screen he does, as robot parts scatter, missiles fly, and people hang out of helicopters or jump from exploding buildings.

When you start to actually engage the film on a level that goes beyond the purely superficial, you realize it’s completely meaningless. The rapidity of the editing leaves objects flying into oblivion and chase sequences that spin in virtual circles, as you strain your eyes to follow where, exactly, the action is going. These shots require no concentration or attention span, as the rules are reset every time Bay pulls back from a tight shot on Shia’s sweaty face or Megan Fox’s boobs bouncing in slow motion (not that I’m complaining). Say what you will about Terminator: Salvation, but at least it had that magnificent chopper one-shot in the beginning (point for McG).

All the action culminates in a final sequence that takes place literally in a sand pit and on top of a pyramid. Why a sand pit? Because it requires zero logistical planning, as characters run in straight lines either to, or from Devastator. Why on top of a pyramid? So that Optimus Prime and The Fallen can engage in a lackluster fight that involves Prime flying in circles around The Fallen, while he yells like King Kong. Say all you want about Bad Boys or Armageddon, but at least Bay used to show some joie de vive in figuring out how to ‘splode things. Now he’s content in placing gigantic robots in a sandbox and letting them hit each other until one stops working. It’s pure laziness, and it reeks of a “let them eat cake” missive to the crowd watching. If the robots ain’t enough for you, too freaking bad. That’s all you get, bitches. Signed, Michael Bay.

You can glance at any other review and read about how awful Transformers 2 is, and how much Michael Bay sucks as a filmmaker. I’m not one to bash dumb movies, or belabor the criticism of Bay for his inherent abilities (or lack thereof) as a filmmaker. The true insult of Transformers 2 isn’t in the bloated length, the terrible plot, the repetitive exposition or the laziness of the action. It’s that all of those put together show that Michael Bay didn’t make this movie for “regular” people who like stupid movies; he made this movie for people he thinks are “stupid.”

And say what you will about the general moviegoing public, but they deserve better than that, even when it comes to dumb, summer blockbusters.

* I’m not sure if this script was affected by the strike at all. If so, it definitely feels like less-than-final draft.

_________________________________________________
Eugene Ahn is the host of the People You Don't Know podcast. He's seen every summer movie there is to see in the last few years.

Read more!

Earnest Goes to Camp: Daniel Plainview, Susan Sontag, and that ending!

By Matthew Poland

If nothing else, There Will Be Blood has been a boon to the T-shirt industry; I can't pass a novelty shop without seeing “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” scrawled in Gothic script over oil-black cotton blends. The ubiquity of that phrase suggests the film has infiltrated the mainstream, but really, it's only one particular scene that's tapped into the zeitgeist. I'm speaking, of course, about the film's notorious coda, a twenty-minute stretch of affected Grand Guignol that has become an autonomous entity in its own right.

That scene, which culminates in Daniel Day-Lewis's misanthropic oilman Daniel Plainview beating to death his longtime rival Eli Sunday with a bowling pin, represents a jarring tonal shift in the film, severing it from the realism of the earlier scenes and serving as a litmus test for viewers. Depending on who you talk to, it's either the moment the film cements its status as a masterpiece or the point where it goes completely off the rails. Certainly, critics have responded with ambivalence. Populist net critic James Berardinelli complains the last act is "poorly focused" and calls the conclusion "strangely hollow," while Slant's Ed Gonzalez deems the coda "ridiculous," describing Day-Lewis's performance in it as "a Howard Hughesian drag act." In his otherwise glowing review for the New Yorker, David Denby calls the scene "a mistake," even as he concedes that it's "astonishing."

The question then becomes how to reconcile this seemingly disparate coda with the rest of the film. Critics remain conflicted about how to read the finale, with many failing to engage the scene on its own terms: Denby, for example, goofily dismisses the scene as a "rebell[ion] against canonization," as if Anderson were trying to sabotage his own film. While there's little question as to the scene’s deliberateness, few critics have delved into the way the finale works. I would like to argue that the stilted affectation of the final scene represents not simply an intentional aesthetic strategy but a purposeful descent into camp. Specifically, I'd like to examine the scene in conjunction with Susan Sontag's conceptualization of that sensibility as formulated in her essay, Notes on "Camp."

Attempting to define the exaggerated sensibility of camp (or "Camp," as she refers to it) that had exploded in the early 1960s, Sontag arrives at a series of observations for understanding the phenomenon. Chief among them is the notion that camp is an unsuccessful attempt at earnestness: "…the essential element," she writes, "is seriousness, a seriousness that fails." It is "art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’" Implicit in this description is camp's striving to be something more than it is. Excessive in both ambition and execution, camp defines itself by its theatricality; as explicated by Sontag, camp embodies "the theatricalization of experience."

It is the theatricality of the final scene—Plainview shuffling back-and-forth on a lane to maintain balance, Plainview bellowing “DRAINAGE!” as he froths saliva, Plainview hurling bowling balls at Eli as he madly lumbers toward him—that places it squarely in the category of camp. Anderson remains coolly detached with the camera, filming in the same crisp, classical style he uses in earlier scenes; consequently, we find ourselves at an aesthetic distance from the action. Sontag speaks about distinguishing "between naïve and deliberate Camp," i.e., inadvertent and self-aware camp. Innocent (and thereby effortless), the former provides the greater pleasure, she contends; the latter is too slick, too calculated to participate in naïve camp’s ebullience. TWBB’s finale, however, brilliantly upends her assertion. The scene is unabashedly outlandish, but whereas deliberate camp typically aims toward shallow parody, here the goal is more akin to alienation. The scene’s lunacy is secondary to its aesthetic function; camp defamiliarizes the film we thought we knew.

Of course, jarring as the scene may be, Anderson prepares us for it throughout; the entire film straddles an uncomfortable balance between genuine earnestness and camp. Certainly, Daniel Day-Lewis's fastidious performance, with its overt nods to John Huston, veers precariously close to hamminess. (Sontag calls camp "the glorification of 'character,'" which is understood as "a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing." I can't think of a better description for Day-Lewis's performance—and I mean that as praise.) Glenn Kenny asserts the film is "not a historical saga" but "an absurdist, blackly comic horror film," and sure enough, the first three-quarters of the film are peppered with odd, sometimes uncomfortable, moments of comedy that anticipate the finale. Plainview's baptism blends daffy slapstick with wrenching confession, while Eli's over-the-top preaching elicits laughter and discomfort. Nevertheless, these moments are embedded, almost seditiously so, in a film whose surface resembles a classical Hollywood narrative: seamless editing, a clean linearity, and a tight chain of cause-and-effect. Though a more subversive structure undergirds its exterior, the film's contours hew to the strictures of a traditional studio film—at least until that last scene.

On a purely rhetorical level, the final scene's shift in register serves as an expert narrative strategy. By infusing the proceedings with camp, Anderson defuses the possibility for tragedy. As Sontag writes, "[Camp] incarnates a victory…of irony over tragedy. … Camp and tragedy are antitheses." In distancing this capstone from the realism of earlier scenes, the film denies the viewer any opportunity for catharsis. So emotionally dissociated are we from these events that we leave the film not purged but jarred. In alienating Plainview from us, Anderson denies us any identification with him, even as he refuses to pass judgment on the character. Perhaps appropriately, the only release experienced in the scene belongs to Plainview, who usurps the audience of any relief. In its embrace of camp, the final scene functions less as a denouement than as one final purgation—not absolution but ablution. Exorcising all those "hatreds" he's built up over the years, Plainview finally collapses in exhaustion. His final declaration—"I'm finished!"—concludes both his character's arc and the film, the two now inseparable. In its heightened theatricality, the film finally matches Day-Lewis's larger-than-life performance; the scene doesn't depict Plainview's madness so much as emanate from it.

In its final moments, There Will Be Blood presents us with the monster that Daniel Plainview has become, and the result is repulsive, terrifying, and—ludicrous. Sontag writes that "the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious," and as we witness the man Plainview has become, we come face to face with the ridiculous. Even as his overblown characterization yields chuckles, however, the scene still summons dread. Heir perhaps to the capstone of Rosemary's Baby, in which Roman Polanski deflates any sense of horror with a gonzo scene of cult hysterics, TWBB's finale paradoxically renders its "monster" laughable even as it unnerves us with his wild unpredictability. Our laughter at Plainview's maniacal behavior is tempered by agitation, a fear of what this man might be capable of doing; when he shifts from hurling bowling balls at Eli to bludgeoning him with a bowling pin, Plainview becomes an object of comic horror. Camp has robbed him of his stature, even as it has elevated his monstrosity.

It would be reductive, of course, to simply boil down this final scene to camp, and Sontag would agree: "…to say all these things are Camp is not to argue they are simply that." The sensibility preserves an ambiguity in interpretation: "the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. … It is the difference…between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice." And certainly, even as the coda remains pure artifice, its very archness conveys meaning. The final scene is burlesque, fever dream, vile pageantry; it is high comedy and low drama; it is the fulfillment of the title's promise and a premonition of it. Are we even to situate this madcap folly in the film's reality or simply relegate it to Plainview's imagination? The distinction hardly matters in a film where objective reality and subjective experience finally collapse; by the end, Plainview, overblown and bellicose, is the film. If, as Sontag suggests, "Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness," then There Will Be Blood demonstrates that affectation can be nuanced expression. Ironic, perhaps, but artifice begets honesty, and the finale’s about-face to the ostensible classicism of earlier scenes reveals not glib detachment but focused disclosure. Hardly reducible to a sloganed T-shirt, the final scene looses meaning from the confines of convention to finally inhabit a world beyond the film, one which grants Daniel Plainview enormity while refusing him appraisal. In other words, it does exactly what camp attempts (but usually fails) to do in Sontag’s eyes: accomplish "something extraordinary."

_______________________________________
Matthew Poland is a Brooklyn-based cinephile.

Read more!

5 for the Day: Scientists on Film

By Simon Hsu

As with all things worth their share of time, recent responsibilities in the turbidity of life have prompted me to consider where my interests lie, a question that inevitably manifested itself in my own cinematic curiosities. These thoughts concerned the authenticity of cinema, on what filmmakers attempt to show, and what we as viewers are and aren’t interested in—heavy but critical questions asked last year by the closing season of The Wire. In fact, I’d credit that series’ meticulous depiction of a massive range of personnel and creator David Simon’s modus operandi of “stealing life” for sparking the theme of this piece: What movies have gotten my profession right?

I am a research scientist, a walk of life whose cinematic counterparts are relegated to a few stale options. We are either a) adequately described with a single adjective, b) contracted by the government or some other institution to explore the unknown, c) create monsters, or d) miniaturize our children and, in the sequel, ourselves. Science and scientists are frequently used as means to explore the fantastical, which is not a criticism but an observation that filmmakers are not interested in the scientists, only the plot points their escapades help reach (or incidentally the plot holes they help cover). Just a handful of films seem to be interested in the lives of people at all. I began to wonder why it is that few seem to be interested in what I value—cinematic form, an organized directorial sensibility and authentic texture, to list a couple—and if what I value in any way reflects what is indeed valuable. Years ago, Robert Altman referred to cinema as the great enabler that allowed us to live many lives. Today we go to the movies to escape.

But I digress. In compiling this list (unranked) I was not interested in the accuracy or validity of the scientific concepts presented, but rather the authenticity of the relationship between scientists and their work. This was admittedly challenging, and surprisingly so, considering cinema’s entirely capable reach. Naturally I don’t presume to speak for the entire community, but trust that the details of our work life and our inquisitive vigor cross fields of study.

***

1. Encounters at the End of the World (2007): Herzog’s stamina compliments our job, as well as anyone who does anything out of a love for their work. In the long run, the film’s subjects could have been a number of other people and still would have been fascinating. I’ve always held that one of the most difficult things a filmmaker can accomplish is to present the mundanity of life in an engaging manner, a precept Herzog achieves through his ever-introspective gaze. As any researcher working long hours gathering data on rather pitiful wages can tell you, the physical nature of our work doesn’t lend much excitement; it’s the hope of discovery, the intellectual reward that incites a cell biologist to scale the murky seafloor the fifty-fourth time, or a penguin scientist to observe the Antarctic birds day after feverish day (“I loathe the sun both on my celluloid and my skin,” Herzog confesses). McMurdo’s inhabitants are given space through interviews conducted in sustained first-person takes, intercut with shots of sea creatures and stunning landscape photography that serve as counterpoints to the reserved manner of the scientist subjects and the melancholic tedium of their work. It’s a rare film that juxtaposes the natures of artist and scientist, as Herzog depicts himself and his subjects as obsessed with deciphering the unquantifiable enigmas of the natural world. Refreshing and still incapable of actorly pretense, his subjects made me question the methodology used to elicit the candor and confidence they quite effortlessly display. An interview reveals that Herzog spent twenty of a thirty minute limit with a glacier scientist “[making] him feel calm and comfortable. Then [he] said: ‘I know that deep inside you are a poet. Tell me about the iceberg, and tell me about your dreams.’” Somewhere scientists are smiling and Mike Rowe should take notes.

***
2. Contact (1997): An animator friend of mine who would be hard pressed to pursue anything in the hard sciences always had a burning desire to be Ellie Arroway, and not simply due to his desire to zip through a wormhole in space, he confessed, but “damn, have you seen anyone this passionate about anything?” Contact, penned by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, is a bit of a double-edged sword—some of the directing here is so good that it’s jarring when Robert Zemeckis retreats to populist Hollywood impulses. Zemeckis has an uncanny ability to confer significance onto inanimate objects (see Wilson, Cast Away). In Contact, scientific equipment takes center stage: Satellite dishes, telescopes, computer monitors. Note how Young Ellie together with her radio forms the emotional centerpiece at the end of her father’s funeral. Another impressive sequence occurs a half-hour into the film, beginning with the camera creeping steadily up on Jodie Foster lounging atop her auto hood, satellite dishes in the distance. The dishes refocus in a separate shot and then back to Foster in a close-up, zooming in toward her closed eyes until an ominous, oscillatory beat picked up through her headphones makes her eyes widen. There’s something striking about how Zemeckis evokes the spirit of discovery and the pursuit for scientific truth, sustaining the pulsating noise throughout the next segment of this sequence, a strategy that creates an unease similar to what James Gray employed with windshield wipers in We Own the Night. Foster’s performance is remarkably controlled but never calculated to where it betrays the authenticity of the moment. Her steadiness has been effectively used to portray fright (The Silence of the Lambs), authority (Inside Man), and now awe. Though Dr. Arroway will remain a lesser known of Zemeckis’ fictional scientists, she still registers as the most bona fide.

***
3. Brainstorm (1983): By and large, sci-fi films display more interest in the fiction than the science. Hokum scientific concepts are free passes for screenwriters looking to explain any number of supernatural phenomenon and, of course, set up the accompanying adventure. While Brainstorm is not entirely innocent of this accusation, it does avoid more than a few clichés, beginning with a chain-smoking scientist played by Louise Fletcher. Film scientists are usually too clever, too educated about the carcinogenic chemicals that abound in cigarettes to indulge in the pleasures of tobacco. I was also particularly pleased with the film’s portrayal of a research group that functions as a team. The singularly “mad” or stalwart rogue scientist concocting experiments of his own does not exist, not even among the most experienced of us. The introductory scene best demonstrates the salience of a research team (of 3, a true-to-life figure), frequently framing all three scientists together within their working environment. The revelation that their sensory invention, “the hat,” is functional is shared, a note any research group with a successful publication, grant or breakthrough can substantiate.

***
4. Hulk (2003): Though triggered by personal calamities, it’s no accident that Bruce Banner’s first transformative episode occurs at his workplace. When that buzzword, passion, is stripped away, we arrive at the irrefutable fact that research requires patience, at times in ungodly amounts that few of us possess. A couple of months ago, a colleague shared the following: Late one night she overheard her PI, not as alone as he thought, furiously declare their NMR spectrometer a “fucking whore,” likely followed by wishes to wreak flask-shattering havoc. Hulk’s midnight fever dream is of secondary interest when compared to the details surrounding the laboratory setting that I found pleasing: The mundane hallways, the unassuming lab equipment, the bench where sample buffers were prepped for graduate students until we earned our own undergrad peons, the feeling of ordinariness. Concordantly, Banner’s lab accident is in many ways the anti-Dr. Manhattan transformation. There’s no editorialized music, no slow-motion; it's a matter-of-fact sequence lasting a distinctly brief 30-seconds. Ang Lee denies us sensationalized pleasure, and with good reason. Admittedly, I still can’t wrap my head around the film’s “dynamic” multi-paneled visual strategy. At best, the amorphous layering of image atop image comes off feeling like De Palma-lite, and at worst, it distracts from the film’s more compelling musings.

***
5. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004): The sense of realness and pathos in Wes Anderson’s film is remarkable, despite the fantasy of the world surrounding its characters: Underwater sea labs, headlight-equipped research dolphins, island-hopping gun battles, etc. This feeling of reality is aided by an undeniable Brechtian self-consciousness, opening with shots of a stage presenting “The Life Aquatic Part 1” to an audience in the film’s world, and closing with the twist that we the real-world viewers have been watching “Part 2” all along. Other examples of this reflexivity exist throughout the film, including jump cuts (boxed up sneakers, cut to sneakers in Bill Murray’s hand, cut to Murray doing toe touch exercises in his new kicks), on-camera documentary filming (Owen Wilson, demonstrating inferior boom mic handling skills), and lateral pans of cross sections of the Belafonte curiously similar to those that Godard/Gorin employ in Tout Va Bien, another highly Brechtian film. All of these strategies heighten the awareness of the protagonist scientist’s mission, exemplifying the primary driving force behind the time, blood and sweat spent on doing what it is we do: The search for truth. Despite the film’s surrealist elements, Zissou faces the same challenges a modern scientist does. Brainstorm, Contact, and Hulk are all conscious of sources of scientific funding, the threat of being shut down and the criticism of scientific peers. But I love that, in Anderson’s film, these predicaments build upon the pathos we derive from the character’s relationships with one another. Zissou is driven to beg his estranged wife for money, more readily demonstrates the acceptance of Ned as his son after learning of Ned’s inheritance and prompts Captain Hennessey to reveal his sexuality. At the end of the film, an initially humorous tumble down a staircase turns sorrowful as Zissou admits he is a “washed up old man with no friends, feeling sorry for himself.” Before his poignant confession, he says to his documenting cameraman “We’ll give them the reality this time.” How many films do?
____________________________________________
A San Diego-based cineaste, Simon Hsu does research on protein structure at the UCSD School of Medicine. He is published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and looks forward to an upcoming publication in Biochemistry.

Read more!

The Conversations: Errol Morris

By Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

JASON BELLAMY: Ten years from now, if not sooner, when people refer to Standard Operating Procedure, they'll call it Errol Morris' film about Abu Ghraib. But anyone who has seen the film, and certainly anyone who has heard Morris discuss it, knows that the prisoner abuse scandal that unfolded at the notorious Baghdad prison wasn't the subject of the documentarian's investigation. For Morris, the scandal is coincidental context. What Standard Operating Procedure is actually about is the elusiveness of unambiguous truth in photojournalism. Morris uses the digital snapshots of prisoner harassment at Abu Ghraib to illustrate that while a picture never lies, it seldom tells the truth. To look at a photo of a hooded man, standing on a box with wires wrapped around his fingers, is to see just that, yet instinctively we give images additional meaning; we fill in the areas outside of the frame. In the context of Abu Ghraib we look at that aforementioned photo and call it a depiction of torture or harassment or effective interrogation or standard operating procedure, etc. Any one of these might be true. A few of them might be true. Or maybe none of those interpretations is true. In the end, all we really have is an image of a hooded man, standing on a box with wires wrapped around his fingers. That's where unambiguous truth ends.

I mention all of this as setup to our conversation about the films of Errol Morris because I think it's fascinating that a documentary filmmaker would call attention to the unavoidable deceptiveness of his medium. Though most moviegoers are savvy enough to realize that documentaries seldom deal in Absolute Truth, the documentary genre is one that relies on the presentation of at least near-truth. As a "documentary," Standard Operating Procedure is akin to 60 Minutes; without that label, it would be akin to A Few Good Men. Fictional films can still be truthful, of course, but their truth has a different weight. In a fiction film the "based on a true story" assertion is a decoration, an accessory. It's like a tattoo. In a documentary, truth is the spine holding everything in place. Thus, you'd think that no documentary filmmaker would want to chop away at the very element that keeps the genre upright. Then again, not many documentary filmmakers are so specifically expressive with their images as Morris. I wouldn't go so far as to argue that Morris' documentaries are more unambiguously truthful than anyone else's, but few filmmakers are so skillful at slicing away the periphery to narrow in on the subject at hand. I can't think of any filmmaker who so adeptly and obsessively focuses our attention to precisely what's on screen.

ED HOWARD: The thing is, truth is always at the center of Morris' films, as you'd expect of a documentary filmmaker, but he also acknowledges that truth is a complicated thing; he's always toying with questions of truth and fiction. Morris' films aren't about The Truth; they're about our personal, private truths, as well as the lies and rationalizations we create for our actions. So fiction and lies and manipulation are also at the center of Morris' films. Fiction is as much the spine of his work as truth. In fact, Morris has gotten a lot of flak as a documentarian for his extensive use of reenactments and reconstructions, starting with his third film, 1988's The Thin Blue Line. I can think of few documentary filmmakers—other than the much cruder Michael Moore—who so obsessively tinker with their images, who are so engaged in presenting only exactly what they want the audience to see. As you said, Morris focuses our attention very tightly; he has a very precise, rigid control over his images, which is not inconsistent with truthfulness but certainly complicates the matter. All documentaries must deal with this issue, but they usually do so behind the scenes. Incompleteness is implicit in every film, whether it's fiction or documentary. If we're seeing only what Morris wants us to see, we're not seeing everything, we're not seeing the whole story. And he's usually dealing with such complex issues and stories that it would be impossible to show everything anyway. I'd imagine that most documentarians grapple with (or at least acknowledge) this stuff privately, but Morris makes it the subtext, if not the subject, of his work.

The solution to this problem, for Morris, is to narrativize his documentaries, to shape and mold his raw material into a forward-moving story that will grip an audience like it's a Hollywood thriller. I want to be clear that this is not a criticism of Morris—I don't agree with those purists who reject his work because of its manipulation, the use of fictional constructs and stylized imagery. I want only to get to the essence of his often powerful work. And that essence must include roughly equal measures of truth and fiction, much like in the work of his idol and mentor Werner Herzog, who pushed a procrastinating Morris into making his first film, 1978's Gates of Heaven. Morris' approach to truth is not singular, it is multifaceted. He recognizes that we each have our own truths. So he simply lets his interviewees speak, whether what they're saying is truth, lies, or something in between, and even if they are immediately contradicted by another interviewee with his or her own conception of the truth.

Morris seldom enters these films as a commentator. His voice is heard very sporadically throughout his oeuvre, only occasionally asking for clarification or nudging a reluctant interviewee into answering a tough question. Mostly, he allows the words of his subjects to stand alone, and he makes no attempt to untangle the contradictions and lies and rationalizations in their words. It's up to the audience to decide what's true, although Morris usually guides his viewers towards his own preferred avenues of interpretation—his narratives are tightly constructed to tell a certain story, to reach the conclusions that Morris wants us to reach from this material. He gives the appearance of objectivity by staying out of the film, by remaining behind the camera, unseen and mostly unheard. But the paradox of his films is that, though Morris himself remains outside the image, seemingly letting objective reality stand on its own, really he's active in every frame of his films, always putting form to how we see and hear things. Over the course of his career, he's become a master storyteller, which is not a trait often ascribed to documentary filmmakers. Maybe it should be used more often. It certainly applies to Morris, at least.

JB: Yes, Morris is a masterful storyteller, and a masterfully deceptive one. Deceptive because, unlike Herzog, he doesn't construct his films in a way that suggests that he has a story to tell. Quite the opposite, Morris plays the part of a priest hearing confessions. This is an accurate description of his involvement on one hand, because Morris' films empower his subjects to tell their own stories. But it's misleading on the other hand, because in the silence of the editing room it's Morris who has ultimate control over these confessions. How Morris packages these testimonials, how they are scored and how he accompanies them with reenactments or metaphorical B-roll, shapes the raw footage. The straightforward nature of Morris' confessional style camouflages the complexity of his filmmaking.

That said, Morris is a far more complex storyteller today than he was in the early stages of his career. Gates of Heaven, about a pet cemetery in California and the people who run it and bury their dead pets there, strikes me as something of an accidental masterpiece. I don't want to undercut Morris' contributions, but in this case it's the oddball subjects who bring complexity to the table, and they don't need much help. In most instances Morris doesn't do much more than point his camera at his characters, pull their strings and let them go. I'd wildly applaud him for coaxing such colorful conversation from his interviewees if they seemed to need require any coaxing. (The attentive camera is a powerful aphrodisiac, I think.) Morris' biggest achievement was just finding this story and these people.

One of the most memorable encounters in the film is with Florence Rasmussen, an old woman who begins several minutes of mad rambling by talking about how she doesn't get around very well and ends it by bragging about how well she gets around. Rasmussen's necessity in this film is flimsy at best; supposedly she lives in the area of the cemetery. But her wacky rambling, like something out of Grey Gardens, is too delicious for Morris to ignore, and so there she is. Rasmussen is just the tip of the oddball iceberg. Compared to The Thin Blue Line or Standard Operating Procedure, where Morris needs to be meticulous with factual specifics, here he can afford to be careless, abstract. Gates of Heaven is a discovery of riches more than it's an invention.

EH: I think that Morris emerged as a storyteller with The Thin Blue Line. His first two films, whatever their other merits, are looser, more anecdotal, and the stories they have to tell are incidental to their appeal. This is especially apparent in the first half of Gates of Heaven, when Morris spends quite some time dealing with the failure of Floyd McClure's idea for a pet cemetery. Structurally, this section points the way forward to Morris' later semi-narrative films, as he cuts back and forth between McClure and the investors he had working with him on his plan. As in later Morris films, they each tell their side of the story, and Morris lets them all talk, lets them contradict one another without correction. But it is, frankly, mostly boring. Before rewatching the film for this conversation, I'd vividly remembered the quirky interviews with the Harberts family and various pet owners in the latter half of the film, and had all but forgotten everything else. I'd wager that no one remembers the film because of its account of Floyd McClure's inept business dealings. In comparison to later Morris works, the storytelling here is rough and unsatisfying, with too many gaps and no sense of context or temporal sequence. It's obvious that Morris has the instinct to tell stories, even at this early point in his career, but he doesn't yet have the proper subject or the aesthetic tools.

The film really finds its stride when it abandons this kind of narrative, giving in to the temptation to simply spend time with these goofy, off-kilter people. Even so, one of the things that bothers me slightly about this film is an unshakeable sense that Morris is making fun of his interview subjects, that he's subtly mocking them and condescending to them. A lot of these people are there primarily for Morris to show off how weird they are, how funny they are. And they are funny, as well as often heart-warming and interesting, but there's something exploitative about some of the bits included here. This is especially true of the sequence in which two old women bicker back and forth about who loved their dead pets more. I mean, why are they in this film if not for us to laugh at their bitchiness?

Morris also turns his (not entirely unjustified) mocking attitude on Phil Harberts, the older son of the family that runs the Bubbling Well cemetery. His motivational lingo, his insistence on viewing every aspect of life through the lens of business and "success," is ripe for parody, and to some extent all Morris needs to do to make fun of him is let the guy talk. But it's also true that the satirical undercurrents of this portrayal come to the fore in the scene where Phil sits surrounded by the trophies and prizes he won as an insurance salesman, and talks about arranging even a Valentine's Day party for his wife and the wives of his friends as a motivational seminar with games to play and prizes to win.

The scenes of Phil with his trophies are another example of Morris' tendency towards arranging reality to tell a story. The staging of all these interviews is very artificial: Morris is creating carefully prepared tableaux from the ephemera and props of people's lives. He seems to sit them down and then arrange objects around them in order to convey various things about them. He's basically controlling the context of how each person is seen. This is something that he would thankfully move away from in his later films, in which the presentation of the interviews is more straightforward and the emphasis is almost entirely on people's words. Here, there's a tone of kitsch that can be distracting and off-putting.

JB: Well, I agree with you about the tone. Even in the best case scenario, if Morris isn't actively trying to make fun of these people, it's obvious that he lets them embarrass themselves for his benefit. Then again, we do have to consider the film's 1978 release. That's six years before the Christopher Guest mockumentary genre made its first deep footprint with This Is Spinal Tap. (Indeed, these characters seem straight out of Best In Show, particularly the guy who works at the rendering plant who can't possibly understand why people don't want to talk about animal rendering during dinner.) It's also several years before the butterfly collar—and many of the other stereotypical 1970s styles featured in this film—became a universal punchline. So I think there are some elements of this film that seem mocking now that weren't at the time. For example, what makes Phil Harberts so hard to take seriously isn't so much that he is excessively prideful about his trophies; it's that he's excessively prideful about these gaudy, shield-shaped 1970s trophies, which look so cheap and tacky now and yet were standard issue at the time. Likewise, I doubt that audiences in 1978 laughed at the sight of that huge red Batphone that's within Phil's reach as he sits by the pool, but it sure is a funny prop now. After the Guest films, we're conditioned to look for these juicy comedy accoutrements that at the time were just modern accessories. To a large degree, when we laugh at Gates of Heaven today, we're laughing at the 70s, and Morris can't be held responsible for that. (On this note, one of my favorite parts of the film is Danny Harberts' earnest delight for his "powerful" 100-watt speakers. Funny now. Then, not so much.)

So I wonder if the setting of these interviews is as "artificial" as I think you're suggesting. Certainly, Morris would want to interview his subjects in places that would evoke their spirit or character, and thus I don't think interviewing Phil Harberts in his wood-paneled office, with his picture of W. Clement Stone prominently displayed, is any more artificial than interviewing the president in the Oval Office. While I appreciate the simple staging and specific focus of interviews in Morris' later films—performed using the "Interrotron," which I'm sure we will discuss later—I also find that I miss the colorful tableaux of Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida. I agree with you that the opening chapter of Gates is tedious, but it's worth experiencing for the poignant moment when Floyd McClure says of losing his pet cemetery, "I was not only broke but brokenhearted," and Morris cuts to a shot of a lonely looking McClure sitting in his wheelchair beneath a large tree. Likewise, I love the shots of Danny Harberts in his "House on the Hill," playing his guitar, showing off his stereo equipment or reclining in his hammock. Images like these bring a richness and sense of place to Gates of Heaven that some of Morris' later pictures are without.

EH: I don't want to imply that I dislike Gates of Heaven, because I really don't. It's a film with much to admire, and in some ways Morris' mocking tone is softened by his compassion and sympathy for his interviewees. Not so much Phil Harberts or the oblivious rendering plant guy, both of whom get the worst of it here, but it's obvious that Morris has warm feelings for the "brokenhearted" McClure and for Danny Harberts. The latter comes across as so sad and isolated in his little house on the top of the hill, having returned from college with his own broken heart after the end of a long relationship. He's in a listless mood, letting his dreams and musical ambitions slowly slip away into the past. He's a compelling young man, soft-spoken and gentle, a man whose once great ambitions and optimism have given way to a reserved, modest quietude, settling for something other than the life he'd really wanted. The shot of him standing on the hill above the cemetery, playing a scorching guitar solo through an amp that sends his riffs reverberating through the valley, is surreal and absurd and yet also surprisingly poignant. The moments spent with him are some of my favorites in the film, and with him at least I don't really get the sense that Morris is mocking him.

The same thing applies to many of the film's pet owners, who can come across as silly, easy targets for mockery, and yet at the same time their devotion to their pets shines through. The same guy who has that funny little moment where he completes his wife's sentence with the one croaked word "neutered," later delivers one of the film's most moving explanations for why pets should not be viewed as material possessions, why they should be treated with "reverence" rather than discarded like a food wrapper.

This is the kind of stuff I find most interesting in the film: not the mockery of simple people but the way the subject of pet cemeteries brings up all these issues about life and death. The film's second half, about the Bubbling Well cemetery, really delves into the love and affection of pet owners toward their animals, their desire to know that their pet has not just been callously disposed of, and the thoughts about mortality and the afterlife that are raised by continually dealing with death and loss in this way. The Harberts patriarch Cal even proposes a new religion of his own, incorporated at a chapel on the cemetery's premises, a religion founded on the belief that any compassionate God or supreme being would care equally for humans and all other animals. I think Morris is at his best when he engages with these issues in a sympathetic way rather than simply poking fun at his hapless interviewees.

JB: Hapless might also describe the subjects of Vernon, Florida. Of course, had Morris been able to follow his original vision, the word we'd use to describe the characters of this second feature effort would be limbless. Vernon, Florida was originally planned to be called Nub City, so named because the town's inhabitants were known to lop off their own limbs in order to collect insurance money. Death threats made against Morris caused the director to abandon the back-bayou amputation storyline and settle for a modest nonlinear tale of backwoods buffoonery. In my mind the characters of Vernon, Florida are as colorful as those of Gates of Heaven, but somehow they're also more believable, and thus Morris' film seems less mocking, even in its most extreme scene when a senile man shows off a turtle and insists it's a gopher.

If the unspoken message from Morris in Gates is often, "Get a load of this…," here I imagine the director saying over and over again, "Fascinating!" Vernon, Florida includes a priest who sermonizes about his "therefore experience," a worm farmer who hasn't read any books on worm farming but knows the books are all wrong, a woman with a jarful of sand that she swears gets fuller each year and a camouflage-wearing turkey hunter, Henry Shipes. The latter subject is my favorite character, sitting outside his trailer home, where turkey claws and beards are mounted on the wall, breathlessly reliving his favorite turkey hunts.

One could read Morris as condescending in this case, and with good reason—most Hollywood features have a patronizing attitude when it comes to the South—but I detect genuine admiration. Shipes is absolutely content with his life, as underlined in the film's final scene, which features Shipes out on the water in a small motor boat, counting dozens of buzzards in a tree and listening to the flapping sounds of their wings. "It gives me that turkey feeling," Shipes says of the flapping. "Mmmmm-mmmmmm! I wish there were as many turkeys as there are buzzards." That's it. That's the man's one wish. Watching the scene I couldn't help but think of the numerous international polls that suggest that those with the least material wealth often live the happiest lives. In that respect, at least, the subjects of Vernon, Florida are almost idealized.

EH: The way that Morris presents his subjects in this film is certainly complicated. There's a good dose of the same kind of subtle mockery that ran through Gates, but also more of the humanist perspective. To me, it's a film about the essential narrowness of our individual existences, the way we each tend to lock into a very circumscribed area and then revisit the same experiences over and over again throughout our lives. Henry the turkey hunter is happy, yes, but it's hard to miss the basic similarity of his turkey hunting stories, which all end with him pointing to one of a handful of identical "eleven inch beards" hung on his wall. Unspoken underneath all this is the question of why we do what we do, why the things that interest us interest us so much. These people talk and talk—about turkeys, about law enforcement, about trapping possums and turtles, about the sand at a vacation spot—but they're seldom able to really communicate why they find these things so interesting, why they're so eager to share their experiences. They probably wouldn't be able to articulate it, not in a way that could come across to a non-believer.

What's complicated about Morris' presentation of these quirky people is that he is sympathetic to them while simultaneously having a little fun at their expense, mocking their tendency to repeat themselves, to retell the same stories. It's hard not to laugh when Shipes begins telling one of his hunting stories for the nth time ("So then he did a double gobble...") and yet at the same time it's also hard not to recognize qualities in these people that exist in everyone—their obsessions are peculiar but their engagement with their lives and the things that interest them are no different from anyone else, anyone with more "normal" obsessions like movies or music or whatever else. It's a good question: why do we laugh, if only a little, at Henry Shipes and not at someone who obsessively watches and talks about movies all the time? What's refreshing to me about this film is that Morris could've easily just been patronizing and condescending (not that he isn't, at times) but instead he digs for something deeper, something universal.

Then again, there's a scene like the one you mention with the preacher, which is hilarious, but unquestionably only there so Morris can make fun of this yokel who thinks he's being profound by verbally footnoting Webster's Dictionary. I mean, this guy just rambles on and on about the meaning of an utterly innocuous word, talking about how he went to look up the word "conjunction" and so on. Finally he makes some lame attempt to wring a spiritual message from all his wordplay. Morris is obviously mocking him, taking a superior perspective, letting the condescension that occasionally shows up in his other interviews really take over. Don't get me wrong, I laughed, but I didn't feel good about it. Morris' position with respect to the other interviewees was much less mocking, more like he was simply getting a kick out of their eccentricity and enjoying their personalities. Here, it very much felt like the educated elite enjoying the bumbling pretensions of a backwoods preacher. At times like this, I feel like Morris is very conscious of his audience, very knowing about their prejudices and the way they're likely to react to something like this. But rather than challenge the prejudices of his audience, he caters to them.

JB: It's interesting that you phrase it that way, because I wasn't sure what my reaction is supposed to be with Vernon, Florida. Watching Gates of Heaven, laughter is unavoidable. I've only seen the movie twice from start to finish, but I've watched that guy interrupt his wife to say "neutered" at least a dozen times. I can't get enough of it. Condescending or not, Gates is frequently hilarious. That said, I didn't find a lot to laugh at in Vernon, and it wasn't because I was turned off, as if sensing that Morris was taking unfair advantage of his subjects. The scene with the preacher, for example, merely caused me to furrow my brow, trying to figure out what on earth he was talking about. I think you're correct that Morris assumes the audience for his film will be more enlightened than the bunch featured on screen, but Vernon, Florida doesn't set up these people for ridicule the way Sacha Baron Cohen makes laugh targets out of Southerners in Borat. I think it's entirely possible that the subjects of Vernon, Florida could see the finished film and take pride in what's there—up until they hear an audience's laughter, that is. So I'm wondering: If we were to suggest that Vernon, Florida is exploitative or condescending, might that say more about us than the movie? After all, as you suggested, we all have our quirks and obsessions. Might this be as faithful a reflection of truth as, say, the reverential Man on Wire? Should these people be out of bounds because of their peculiarity? Doesn't that only further the pretentiousness that makes us laugh in the first place?

EH: It's definitely a tricky subject, as I tried to hint at above. I mean, what really makes these people targets of ridicule in these two movies? Is it anything Morris does, or is it just that we're bringing our own stereotypical beliefs and prejudices to the film? Is Morris banking on our prejudices to make his movies work? I really can't say for sure. I just know that, although I see the humor that Morris is going for in these films—and I'd be lying if I denied laughing—I'm uncomfortable with the suspicion that Morris is exploiting our tendency to laugh at people we see as less sophisticated than us, whether rightly or wrongly.

This all reminds me of a discussion about Jennifer Baichwal's documentary The True Meaning of Pictures, a film that deals with a lot of the same issues that are present in Morris' work. That film is about the work of the photographer Shelby Lee Adams, who photographs the poorest, most outrageous people he can find in rural Appalachia and then displays the photos in high-profile art galleries. Needless to say, the debate about whether he's "documenting" or "exploiting" his subjects is more or less endless, even though the rural folks themselves, with very few exceptions, love the photos. My own feeling is that a photo (or a film) is dependent on its context for a large part of its meaning. In my own review of Baichwal's film, I posed the question of "what matters more: what the artist thinks he's doing, or what the audience viewing the art think it's doing. And if it's the latter, which audience?" I think this conundrum applies equally well to Morris. Should we blame him just because people in certain audiences find humor in his portrayals of these people? Or do we have to get into the inevitably knotty question of whether or not he intended to make fun of his subjects?

JB: This is a conundrum that applies to various forms of reportage, actually. In print, for example, there tends to be disagreement among writers about how to quote someone who butchers the English language. The hard journalistic rule is unmistakable: what the source says is what the source says; so that's the quote, verbatim. But there are those who feel that there's nothing wrong with cleaning up something like, "He don't like you," so that it's "He doesn't like you." The argument goes that if you don't make that change, the quote becomes about the subject's poor grammar rather than what the subject is discussing. Then again, if the subject of the story is the person with poor grammar, then that's part of the story, just like the Vernon character's insistence that his pet turtle is a gopher is part of his story.

All of which leads me here: In my mind, Morris' only journalistic responsibility, presuming he has one (Herzog might disagree), is to capture his subjects accurately according to his encounters with them, because intent is an even trickier thing than either of us has suggested thus far. When Morris began Vernon, Florida, for example, his intent was to expose Nub City. By the time filming ended, his intent was something else, and it might have included wanting to exalt the subjects of his film, or he might have meant to humiliate them, or something else in between—we could argue about that for days. But before any of that, his intent, almost certainly, was to have his film be a success.

Morris wouldn't have expected to make waves at the box office, but I think it's safe to assume that he hoped his film would be well-regarded and allow him to receive financing to make another film. Only filmmakers with deep pockets can avoid thinking this way. And so even though Pauline Kael wasn't thinking about a small documentary like Vernon, Florida when she made the following argument, I can't help but quote this passage from her famous 1969 article on cinema trash: "If you could see the ‘artist's intentions' you'd probably wish you couldn't anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist." Applied to this discussion: even if Morris' first intent might be to glorify his oddball subjects, if he also takes advantage of their eccentricities in a way that exploits their weaknesses, that's not necessarily a crime, nor is it necessarily dishonest.

EH: It's funny you should bring up that Kael quote at this point, because a "relentless march … to fulfill its obvious purpose" could serve as a fairly accurate description of Morris' next film, The Thin Blue Line. If Morris' intentions are sometimes fuzzy and uncertain in his first two films, there's absolutely no doubt about what he's after in his third film. It's with this film that Morris abandons the anecdotal structure of his earlier documentaries and commits himself to narrative. Of course, this is only natural considering his subject. As with the aborted origin of Vernon, Florida in a story about amputation and insurance fraud, The Thin Blue Line was originally supposed to be a documentary about the psychologist James Grigson, nicknamed "Dr. Death" because he often testified to get the death penalty for convicted murderers. Instead, Morris wound up seizing on one of the men Grigson helped send to death row: Randall Adams, a laidback drifter who was serving a life sentence (commuted from death) for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood. Morris instinctively grasped that something was off about this case, and he pursued the evidence with the doggedness of a defense attorney trying to clear his client. And like a good lawyer, Morris structures his film to present his evidence in the most dramatic, effective manner possible.

The Thin Blue Line is a huge leap forward for Morris in terms of his craft. As good as his first two films are in many ways, I'd never call them tight or particularly well-constructed. They're rough and loose and rambling (which is of course part of their charm), while The Thin Blue Line is a perfectly calibrated machine. The film moves with a confident forward momentum, driven by the pulsating, unforgettable score of Philip Glass, which from its first notes lends a sinister, melancholy undercurrent to the film. The film's opening minutes economically establish the mood with a series of shots of the Dallas skyline at night, dark and foreboding, with Morris selecting buildings as though highlighting details in a painting, before finally showing the full shot. This very cinematic mood-setting establishes immediately that this is a new Morris. Then he leaps directly into Adams' story, told through the Rashomon-like multiple perspectives and shifting timelines that would become Morris' most distinctive stamp as a filmmaker. He interviews Adams along with the police officers, witnesses, judges and lawyers involved with the case, and most notably the creepy David Harris, the star witness against Adams and also the most obvious suspect in the killing.

From this collage of stories and voices, the full picture slowly begins to emerge. Morris proves himself a born storyteller here; he probably would've been a great trial lawyer, too. He methodically arranges the evidence, allows the story to take shape over time so that soon the conclusion is inescapable: David Harris, not Randall Adams, murdered that policeman, and the conviction of Adams was a combination of police incompetence, opportunistic "witnesses" and a willful refusal to see the truth. Along the way, he dismantles the case against Adams from top to bottom, discrediting witnesses, casting doubt on various testimonies, and especially turning the spotlight on Harris, who first pointed the police onto Adams' trail. Kael's quote would indicate that the film's single-minded dedication to its purpose should be a problem, a sign of a "hack" at work, and yet this commitment to its message is actually the film's greatest strength. It's a gripping, powerful story, enhanced by Morris' feel for drama and his visualization of the key moments through the use of reenactments, the controversial technique that would become one of his signature visual strategies from this point on. This is the film that, for better or worse, solidified the Errol Morris aesthetic that runs through all his subsequent work.

JB: Indeed, this is the film in which Morris' signature style began to take shape. And while I agree with you that Morris demonstrates a single-minded commitment to his intent in The Thin Blue Line, I doubt that Kael would disparage him for it. The hack quote, I think, was made in reference to makers of fiction films, which almost by rule cannot be more than what their creators bring to the table. Documentary filmmaking works differently. Rather than creating a story from nothing, the challenge is to carve a story from a much larger whole; it's like excavating a fossil. The end result needn't be as refined as The Thin Blue Line, of course; Morris' earlier works prove that. Still, to be able to chip away at such a large and complex subject until a striking, free-standing story remains suggests a creative, imaginative and visionary mind, not a lazy one. Not to mention that Morris does almost everything in his power to prevent The Thin Blue Line from being a "relentless march" toward an "obvious purpose," which is where those reenactments come in.

For years now I have read suggestions like yours, that Morris' now familiar dramatic technique stirred controversy when The Thin Blue Line was released. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. Is it simply because Morris blended fiction and nonfiction? Was that technique really that radical in 1988? If that's all it was, I don't get it, because unlike Herzog films like Land of Silence and Darkness or Bells From the Deep, which blend truth and fiction in ways that even the most attentive viewer would struggle to differentiate, there's no mistaking which elements of Morris' film are fabricated for dramatic effect. They'd be the ones usually unfolding in slow-motion, the ones usually scored by ominous music, the ones usually featuring faceless characters and usually being repeated about five times over. In short, the dramatic recreations would be almost any moment in which the camera is pointed at something other than the person being interviewed.

Ethically, I see no reason, none, to take issue with Morris' reenactments. Dramatically speaking, however, his techniques are hit-and-miss, both in this case and in subsequent films. Sticking with The Thin Blue Line for the moment, Morris' use of dramatic reenactments allows the audience to form an essential geographical understanding of the crime scene while also infusing an otherwise inert film with some much-needed motion. But all too often Morris overdoes it. For each dramatic flourish that instantly and effortlessly evokes the intended mood, like the shot of an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts that portrays Adams' angst in the interrogation room, there's another flourish that seems like unnecessary filler. A prime example of the latter would be the multi-shot sequence charting the flight of a milkshake as it's tossed from the window of a police car and eventually explodes on the pavement below. In instances such as that one, Morris' minimalist streak, exemplified by his talking-head interviews, loses out to what I've always assumed is ego; a need to call attention to the filmmaking itself.

EH: Believe it or not, Morris' film really did stir up some heat upon its release that it certainly wouldn't now. It was even excluded from contention in the Academy Awards' documentary category, partly because of its use of reenactments. It's easy to overlook just how unique and stylized this film must have seemed at the time, before crime-scene reenactments became de rigeur on countless TV shows—a trend that Morris himself probably helped kickstart. I'm with you, though, that I see no reason for the fuss; the "fictional" elements of Morris' films are pretty much no-nonsense visualizations, meant to illustrate a point (either literally or symbolically) rather than to obscure or twist facts. As evidenced by our last conversation, I've never had the problems you do with Herzog's quest for "ecstatic truth," but in terms of documentary ethics, what Morris does is far less problematic.

As for the aesthetic merits of Morris' non-documentary inserts, I have my own reservations about many such intrusions, but none worth mentioning in this film, which I still consider one of Morris' masterpieces. His visual flourishes here serve to either intensify the atmosphere or elucidate important points. Sometimes they do both, like the low-angle shot of the police car with the officer's dead body lying next to it in the fog: a gorgeous and haunting image that recurs several times. Morris uses repetition brilliantly, not just in the pulsations of Glass' score, but also in the rhythmic editing patterns that return to the same images, the same moments, over and over again, each time layering in new information or looking at familiar events from a different perspective. The actual murder and its aftermath is replayed multiple times, each time with details subtly changed, the "facts" rearranged to coincide with each witness's testimony. This underscores Morris' essential point that the facts in this case are murky and contradictory at best, and that the case against Adams was a hodge-podge of mutually exclusive variations on the same event. I even appreciated the slightly ironic grandeur of the milkshake shot, which, coupled with the inclusion of a diagram of the crime scene, helps establish that the murdered policeman's partner was not standing outside the car, as she was supposed to be (and as she testified she was), but was still inside the car drinking a milkshake.

Even Morris' penchant towards mockery is used in the service of a good cause here, as he reserves his harshest bile for some of the key witnesses against Adams, and especially Emily Miller, who by all appearances fabricated her testimony entirely, partly out of a desire to help her daughter with a pending criminal trial, and partly because she fancied herself an amateur detective. Morris intercuts her interview with excerpts from an old mystery movie, where a dashing detective is aided by a curious and quick-witted female assistant—it's obvious that this is how Miller views herself, and Morris' inclusion of this footage instantly deflates her, makes her seem ridiculous and morally bankrupt.

More to the point, this film just holds together so well. I'd seen it several times before revisiting it for this conversation, and even knowing it as well as I do, I found myself caught up once again in its rhythms, driven along by its masterful use of suspense and narrative ellipses: it's a "wrong man" thriller that would've made Hitchcock proud. Seven years elapsed between Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line, and though the continuities are obvious, it's equally obvious that, visually and in terms of filmmaking craft, Morris matured a great deal in the interim.

JB: I agree. I think he matured, and I suspect he left this experience a much more confident filmmaker. Morris' control of the story in The Thin Blue Line is unfailingly impressive. As you noted, he dangles numerous scenarios in front of us, making each one at least momentarily plausible. He withholds certain nuggets of information just long enough for us to see how the case against Adams was built—strung together by biased or otherwise closed-minded people with selective vision.

Additionally, this is the film that exposes the true excellence of Morris' interviewing talents. In terms of practice, he wouldn't use the Interrotron until Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, but already you can see how relaxed and forthcoming people are when talking to Morris. Whether it's Adams outlining his innocence, or Harris talking around the truth, or a crooked cop discrediting Adams, or Miller bragging about her sleuthing skills, each and every person interviewed in this film speaks as if he/she is the one in control and the one in the right. None of them, save Harris occasionally, is ever on the defensive. All of them speak confidently, as if Morris is their most trusted ally. Obviously, it took a lot of effort on the part of Morris to gain this level of comfort and trust with his interviewees, particularly Harris, who doesn't provide his kinda-sorta confession until late in the game, and only off-camera. These people didn't open up to Morris as quickly and easily as a celebrity opens up to Barbara Walters, but the result here is much more real, more poignant.

Speaking of poignancy: I'd be remiss if I didn't pause here to point out Morris' talent for closing out his films with an emotionally powerful image. Gates of Heaven concludes with surprisingly moving shots of plastic animals; reminders of beloved pets now gone. Vernon, Florida ends with the aforementioned scene of Henry Shipes, drifting on the open water in the twilight, thinking about his favorite subject: turkey hunting. In the case of The Thin Blue Line, the actual closing shot isn't the one that stirs the emotions; instead, it's the shot that comes a few minutes earlier, when the mystery ceases to be a mystery. David Harris is reflecting on his childhood, discussing the brother who died too young and the father he felt ignored him, and right before our eyes he has an epiphany. Harris says that perhaps his criminal exploits were an attempt to get back at his father. However, he concludes, "I wasn't doin' nuthin but hurting myself." It's then that Harris, a triumphant gleam in his eyes, proud to have experienced this awakening, reaches up and scratches his head, thereby revealing for the first time his shackled wrists. Given that Harris does his interviews in an orange jumpsuit, we never doubt that he's in jail, but by concealing Harris' wrists, Morris manages to leave his guilt in doubt. After we've heard the story, after we've seen all the evidence, only then does Morris provide us with the catharsis of confirming Harris' imprisonment. Remarkably, even though Harris is actually in prison for a different crime, that moment provides a more satisfactory confession than the more specific one that Morris tacks on to the end, almost as an addendum. That's a compliment.

EH: It's true that Morris is a wonderful interviewer, able to get his subjects to open up to him with disarming ease. It's rare that one of his subjects seems reticent, even when they have good reason to clam up. (Robert McNamara in The Fog of War is a notable exception, but even he says so much more than one would expect.) I'm sure we'll get into the Interrotron more in regard to Morris' later films, but at this point I think it's worth pointing out that his development of that device—which uses projection technology to get interview subjects to look directly into the camera when being interviewed—was an attempt to improve upon methods he was already using. In all his films, starting with his first, he would place his face as close as possible to the camera so that when those in front of the camera looked at him, they would appear to be looking directly at the camera. The Interrotron allowed Morris to get this effect more easily and more convincingly, but it wasn't necessarily a drastic change in his approach. What Morris wants, in all his films, is to foster a direct connection between the audience and the people onscreen, to create the illusion of the eye contact that one would have in a true face-to-face conversation. Perhaps it's also true that Morris' methods destabilize his subjects a bit, throwing off their expectations about conventional interviews and encouraging them to let out more than they otherwise would have.

In any event, Morris' next film, A Brief History of Time, didn't require the investigatory digging of The Thin Blue Line, but it does pose its own unique set of problems in terms of massaging its interviews into a coherent and satisfying whole. Based on the book of the same name by famed physicist Stephen Hawking, this film has the daunting task of condensing and explicating Hawking's complex philosophical and scientific ideas for a popular audience. There's also the challenge of working in a visual medium and being confronted with a subject that is essentially abstract, not only non-visual but very nearly impossible to visualize. The concepts being dealt with here are convoluted "what if" scenarios about the underpinnings of the universe, its creation and eventual destruction. It's a specialized field, ordinarily inaccessible to all but the most advanced physicists, and it's difficult to wrap one's head around the abstract concepts being bandied back and forth at this level.

Of course, if anyone could find a way to visualize Hawking's developing theories about the flow of time and the end of the universe, it's Morris. He simply and elegantly finds the proper images to accompany some of Hawking's more out-there theories—like the falling teacup that shatters, reassembles itself, and then shatters again, reflecting Hawking's changing ideas about the flow of time during the eventual collapse of the universe. Morris treats the end of the universe kind of like the crime scene in The Thin Blue Line, returning several times to this image, re-imagining and modifying the scenario as Hawking rethinks his theory. Hawking's ideas are still a challenge—the guy barely seems to be thinking on a human level most of the time—but Morris' film makes abstract physics at least accessible, and often even entertaining. He accentuates the fun in these mind-bending theoretical gymnastics, the spirit of playing a game, solving a grand puzzle. There's a refreshing lightheartedness in this film, and in Hawking; in response to Einstein's famous quote about God and chance, Hawking quips, "not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."

JB: It's funny that you mention the dice quote, because it marks one of the times Morris drifts into overproduction, in my opinion. The image of God throwing dice is one that's best imagined and doesn't require any kind of visual accompaniment to understand. But that doesn't stop Morris from showing a pair of dice spinning against a backdrop of stars. It's a rather absurd image in the first place, and Morris, as he often does, holds the image longer than necessary. This doesn't taint the film in any significant way, but it is a representative gaffe in a film in which Morris seems a little uncomfortable with his material, as if intimidated by the inherent challenges. I agree with you that A Brief History of Time does a remarkable job of making tangible some mostly intangible concepts: black holes, the creation of the universe, quantum physics, etc. However, Morris' camera never finds anything that's more captivating than the sight of Hawking in his wheelchair, and as a result he overcompensates for Hawking's inertness with his directorial flourishes. I didn't need to see the dice, for example, nor did I need to see a teacup fall and shatter on the floor. Arguably, those metaphors are better when conjured against the projector screens of our imaginations anyway. Regardless, here they're unnecessary filler—padding.

This is a rare instance in Morris' career in which I find the concepts being discussed more interesting in principle than in realization. It's an entertaining enough film, and it allows me to feel like I understand black holes at least somewhat, which is an impressive achievement. But when the film ends with an image of Hawking's wheelchair, framed from behind in front of a sea of stars, looking as if he's ready to blast off into the solar system to meet up with the Winnebago from Spaceballs, I don't think I'm supposed to snicker. One way or another, despite the complexity of the subject matter and the fascination of Hawking, A Brief History of Time doesn't reverberate like Morris' best films. Or am I alone on this one?

EH: I wouldn't call it one of his better films, no. It's entertaining and I enjoy the way that Morris weaves together Hawking's biography (mostly narrated by various relatives and acquaintances) with the discussion of his theories. It was also illuminating in the sense that it drew some surprising but intuitive connections between deep science, metaphysics and theology: at times, Hawking comes across as much like a philosopher as a scientist. There's also the typical Morris theme of people who are really super-excited about some very esoteric stuff. I loved the montage where a bunch of scientists each try to explain what it would be like to fall into a black hole, and you can see them getting all geekily giddy like they're talking about a really cool episode of Star Trek or something. Morris would really delve deeper into this with his next film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, which is all about that kind of intellectual excitement.

That said, while I admire A Brief History of Time, its aesthetic ambitions do seem fairly modest in comparison to some of Morris' other work. This could be an especially good PBS documentary, but as a Morris film it doesn't have the thematic depth and sense of purpose that characterizes his best work, like The Thin Blue Line or Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Maybe because of that, I find that I liked the film while I was watching it but don't actually have that much to say about it. It's a fun film, though, and some of Morris' goofier choices—like the too-literal use of those red dice or the bizarre image of a chicken floating in space that opens the film—make sense in that context.

JB: Certainly A Brief History of Time feels like Morris Lite when compared against Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. That film, released in 1997, feels like the love child of Morris' eccentric and abstract early works (Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida) and his intricate and data-rich masterwork, The Thin Blue Line. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a film that uses as subjects a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a naked mole rat enthusiast and a robot maker. On paper, it would seem like it must be a disjointed film, or at least an episodic one, but far from it. Instead, it's a symphony, marrying these disparate characters by their passion, craftsmanship, simple eloquence and, yeah, esotericism. Morris, waving his maestro baton, switches between his subjects so gracefully that sometimes they appear to be finishing one another's sentences. It's an incredible achievement, perhaps even the most impressive of Morris' storied career.

But, more than any artful technique, what stands out is Morris' reverence for his subjects. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is anything but a freak show, even though that's precisely what I thought I was going to see the first time I watched it. Yes, the four men featured here have unusual passions, and as a result they're a little unusual themselves. (I mean, you have to be wired a little differently to want to get into a cage with lions or to spend five decades of your life shaping topiaries, right?) Two of the subjects are a little peculiar at first glance: Ray Mendez, the naked mole rat specialist with the butterfly bowtie, and Rodney Brooks, the robot guy with the unbreakable smile and the super-charged twinkle in his eyes. But as I suggested in relation to The Thin Blue Line, here's a case in which each of the subjects being interviewed seems to feel empowered, proud, respected and respectable. Yes, each of them has a sense of humor about their work—they aren't oblivious to the abnormality of their vocations—but at no point are they desperate to justify their zeal. Each man speaks about his cherished line of work like Martin Scorsese talks about films, and so even if we wrinkle our noses at their interests, we're unavoidably drawn to their passion.

A key distinction to make is that Fast, Cheap & Out of Control isn't about lion taming, topiary gardening, naked mole rat behavior and robot construction, though each subject gets discussed at length; it's about the people who dedicate their lives to these things. If you ever wanted to make the case that Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida are more compassionate for their subjects than demeaning, this would be Exhibit A. Morris is genuinely fascinated here, and I get the feeling he thinks we should be fascinated, too.

EH: Yes, if there's anything Morris has done that inclines me to give him the benefit of the doubt about the "freak show" elements in his first two films, this film is it. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control has roughly the same idea as his first films—an assortment of interviews with quirky individuals—but the execution couldn't be more different. Your comparison to a symphony is appropriate, since music provides the driving rhythm for the film; everything moves and breathes in time with the Philip Glass-inspired circus music of Caleb Sampson. It's also notable that Morris all but discards the objective pose he takes in his earlier work. The film is a visceral, frenetic act of pastiche, a blending of disparate stories into a wild pop art collage in which the excitement of his protagonists (who often literally pop their eyes wide, like cartoon characters, when talking about their unusual pursuits) is translated into Morris' own enthusiasm, expressed in the propulsive speed of the editing and the sped-up photography. Morris blends the stories of his four subjects together with clips from an old Clyde Beatty pulp adventure film, cartoons, stock footage, and comic panel enlargements with the Ben-Day Dots clearly visible.

The impression is not of Morris mocking his subjects or standing aloof from them, but of actively engaging with them, sharing in their excitement and their intellectual engagement with the things that interest them. Part of it is the milieu: one senses that Morris is much more comfortable as an anthropologist of fringe science and unique achievements than he is when chronicling rural living or the ways in which "ordinary" folks spend their time. He's never condescending here, never engaging in mockery. What he's doing is tracing the connections between these people's disparate interests, weaving them together into a coherent story, teasing out the themes and concepts running through all four stories: humanity's relationship to the natural world, the attempts to tame or control or reshape nature, to imitate it, to replace it, to evolve and change. It's a film about humanity's experiments with its own physical and mental limits, our attempts to better understand ourselves, our environment, our fellow species on this earth, and the ways in which everything in the world or the universe might fit together. In this respect it's a natural extension of the themes introduced by Hawking in A Brief History of Time.

At least two of Morris' subjects (naked mole rat expert Ray Mendez and robot engineer Rodney Brooks) seem very conscious of this theme: they spend a lot of time thinking about the intellectual implications of their work, and to some extent this is what interests them as well as Morris. Mendez is fascinated by the idea that naked mole rats are a mammal species whose social structures and ways of life mimic those of supposedly much lower forms like insects, a phenomenon that was once thought to be impossible. For Mendez, the discovery of the mole rat confirms what he had always suspected: that humans are more like insects, more like lower creatures, than we like to admit or think about. The fact that a mammal species, in the right conditions, will form a society and adaptive biology that makes them live more or less like insects confirms that the hierarchies of animal life are more mutable and tangled than is otherwise thought.

By the same token, one suspects that Brooks is eccentric even among other robot designers, in that he is not thinking in terms of replicating humanity in a mechanical form. He has no interest in traditional AI or humanoid robots but rather designs robots that are more like mechanical ants, blindly following sets of basic procedures which have no "meaning" to the robot beyond instinct, and yet by the combination of simple commands these robots can complete complex tasks. He imagines a future in which robots simply exist in the world much like animals do, performing tasks that are useful to humans in various ways not because they've been commanded to but simply because that's what they've evolved to do. This is a unique conception of robots, since even most of our sci-fi tends to imagine advanced robots as humanoid and "thinking" through the application of sophisticated AI. In our conversation about Solaris, we spoke about how the human imagination finds it hard to get beyond human experience, beyond ourselves, to think in abstract terms about a non-human understanding of the world. Brooks is about as close as it's possible for humans to get to this kind of out-of-consciousness experience, with his ability to imagine an entirely non-human future, one in which insectoid robots have "evolved" to be the next step. This is fascinating, complex stuff, and Morris is able to explore these ideas because he is really interested in what these four men have to say, is really engaged by their wild ideas and their fertile imaginations.

JB: Right. Here in particular Morris lets his subjects' "wild ideas and fertile imaginations" serve as the winds that direct the course and tenor of his film. Morris captains the ship, too, obviously; this film is far less organic than something like Vernon, Florida. But despite Morris' tendency to rearrange his footage until the finished whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, what I enjoy about his films is how deferential they feel. In other words, I don't get the sense that Morris begins his projects with his mind made up about what he's going to find or what kind of story he wants to tell. In contrast, that's not the feeling I get watching Herzog, who obeys his own interests until his films reflect his psyche rather than those of his subjects. (It's not their "ecstatic truth" he's after; it's his "ecstatic truth." Thus, in some instances Herzog shapes his material, or outright fabricates it, until it fits his desired vision.)

Now, to be clear, there's nothing "wrong" with Herzog's approach, and in our previous conversation you made strong arguments about the merits of Herzog's role as guide and storyteller. So what I'm trying to suggest here isn't that Morris' style is somehow superior to Herzog's. Instead, I'm simply celebrating what I think is Morris' best skill as a documentary filmmaker: he listens.

EH: I don't want to get into the whole Herzog discussion again, but I think there's plenty of room for both approaches—and so much overlap that the distinction probably isn't nearly as clear-cut as you suggest. The weird thing about Morris is that he combines his openness to other perspectives with a Herzogian willingness to manipulate and stylize the presentation of his interviews in various ways. You're right that he distinguishes himself from Herzog by keeping his persona and interests somewhat remote from his films, but in his own way he shapes and inhabits this material nearly as much as Herzog does. It's more subtle (Morris stays behind the camera, and seldom lets us hear his voice) but that doesn't mean that Morris isn't there, chopping away at the footage and contextualizing people's words to get at what he wants to say.

I mentioned Mendez and Brooks above as two Morris interview subjects who are very much aware of and sympathetic with the broad themes resonating throughout the film. The other two interviewees here, animal trainer Dave Hoover and topiary gardener George Mendonça, are simply talking about the fields they love. They think of what they do as a craft, even as art, but they certainly don't think of their work as taming nature or expanding humanity's boundaries, even though this is the larger context into which Morris places them. So I don't think of Morris as primarily a listener. It's obvious to me that Morris has his own ideas that he wants to get across with each film, that he's not simply spitting back what people say to him. At the very least, this makes him not a passive listener but an active one, always thinking about ways to fit things together, to probe the subtext of what his interviewees are saying. And in some cases—most prominently in "gotcha" films like The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death and The Fog of War—he's actively working against the text of his subjects' words, getting at ideas that run contrary to what's actually being said. Whereas in a case like that Herzog might simply ignore his subject and just say what he wanted to say, Morris is sneakier: he'll undercut the interviewee with additional footage, or with his editing, or by juxtaposing one interview against another. They use different methods, but I'd argue there are many times where the end results aren't so distinct.

JB: Those are all good points and I'm glad you made them. I don't necessarily disagree with anything you just said, and it's absolutely true that the strength of Morris' authorial hand varies from picture to picture. Again, without wanting to rehash the whole Herzog debate, and without casting any ethical judgment, I do think—at least in this picture—that Morris listens first and then reacts, that the interviews inspire the themes. I use Herzog as a contrast, because as his career has gone on he seems to listen less and obey his own voice more. Of course, this is just the feeling that I get. As far as Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is concerned, the truth might be that Morris set out to make a film about individuals taming nature and then sought subjects to fit into his scheme. I might be totally wrong about which director is more deferential to his subjects. But my instincts say that Morris is more, let's say, open-minded (which isn't to damn Herzog as some closed-minded megalomaniac; not at all). That's my gut reaction. Listening critically is still listening.

EH: Having said that, I wonder what you think of Morris' "authorial hand" in his next film, Mr. Death. You've mentioned that you're sometimes bothered by Morris' metaphorical visualizations and stylized sequences in his later films, and I think this film is probably the best example of his sporadic slippage into aesthetic overkill. Maybe the film just suffers from following Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, probably the perfect marriage of form and content in Morris' entire oeuvre. In Mr. Death, Morris applies his patchwork aesthetics—switching between film stocks, from black-and-white to color, overexposing images so they glow brightly, stitching in unrelated inserts—to material that really doesn't need to be jazzed up in this manner. Some of Morris' choices, which gave such drive and energy to his previous films, are arbitrary here, like tics of habit rather than considered responses to the actual material. I don't dislike the film, and as always I find Morris' chosen subject (the bizarre death penalty engineer/accidental Holocaust apologist Fred Leuchter) grotesquely fascinating, and his themes worth exploring. But the visual and audio overload is a bit much, at times distracting from the substance of the film.

JB: Actually, I don't find Mr. Death especially overproduced compared to most of Morris' works. (Even Fast, Cheap & Out of Control slips, um, out of control over its final 20 minutes.) In each of Morris' films since The Thin Blue Line, in which he established his now trademark aesthetics, there are stylized interludes that I find agonizingly tedious and/or unnecessary. Sometimes Morris falls overly in love with his archival film snippets. Sometimes the score is excessively dramatic. Sometimes he recreates events that don't need recreation. (For example, in Mr. Death I have no idea why Morris dramatizes the image of Leuchter pulling debris out of a puddle at Auschwitz, given that earlier we see genuine archival footage of Leuchter pulling debris out of a puddle at Auschwitz.) Also, I always find myself wondering what compels Morris to continue to employ slow- or fast-motion for (questionable) effect. Isn't he bored with the trick yet? I know I am.

But Mr. Death is never boring; Fred Leuchter makes sure of that. Leuchter's investigation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz is fascinating for its almost indescribable combination of meticulousness and carelessness. In terms of subject matter, Morris certainly has himself another winner here; it's utterly amazing that Leuchter could do so much detailed research while completely overlooking the obvious because it contradicts his desired outcome. (Or maybe Leuchter is just fucking stupid. Take your pick.) If someone wanted to build a case that Morris exploits his subjects, this film would support that argument, because while Leuchter gets to defend himself with the help of a few friends, the deck is stacked against him. For example: In addition to bringing in a historian to refute Leuchter's revisionist claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, Morris counters support statements from Leuchter's Holocaust-denying allies with the testimony of two Jewish advocates who seem to have no real ties to the story beyond being Jewish. (Because they wouldn't be biased, would they?)

As you'd expect, Morris still appears to be genuinely interested in Leuchter's story and its inherent twisted logic, and even though Morris frequently undermines Leuchter's testimony, Leuchter's theories are allowed to resonate to the point that someone who insists that the Holocaust is nothing but myth and propaganda could probably have that belief strengthened by this film. Maybe that's why I find Mr. Death a difficult film to get close to. It's disturbing. There's something about watching a guy fondling the pieces of an electric chair that makes a feces-covered naked mole rat suddenly appealing.

EH: It could be that my problem with Morris' aesthetic in this film is simply a function of too much exposure: as you hint, Morris tends to reuse the same basic palette in film after film, and it does get wearying after a while. When he's at his best, and his material is especially sharp, I'm enthralled, as I was throughout The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. But his aesthetics grated on me at several points in Mr. Death, and I'm not sure if his stylization is really especially distracting here or if I just notice it more because the film itself isn't as gripping as his prime works. Still, even second-tier Morris isn't without its merits, and Fred Leuchter is an unforgettable character, if nothing else.

What's fascinating about Leuchter (and this film) are all his weird contradictions. He can be intelligent and methodical, and yet also either really stupid or simply prone to mental blind spots the size of Mount Rushmore. He thinks of his death penalty work as humanitarian in some way, and yet in trying to improve conditions for death row inmates, he's making executions easier and more efficient for the state. (There's also something kind of creepy, even almost sexual, about his fondling of electric chairs and such, though I wonder how much of that is attributable to Leuchter and how much to the stylized, artificial situations Morris thrusts him into.) And while he becomes a steadfast Holocaust denier on the basis of virtually no evidence, one suspects that he kind of stumbles into it by accident, that he's not really an evil guy but more a victim of his own simplemindedness.

But I mean, the film is just about as fair as it can possibly be to a Holocaust denier. True, Morris totally tears apart Leuchter's claims, but what else could you expect? Let's face it, these ideas are not difficult to debunk, and you have to be almost willfully blind to contradictory evidence in order to conclude that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of scientific methodology would be screaming at the screen about control groups and unwarranted assumptions long before Morris begins breaking down Leuchter's results. The historian who appears in the film demonstrates just how easy it is to refute Leuchter's conclusions: all he needs to do is pull out a few readily available blueprints and memos from the records. It's more than obvious that Leuchter's a buffoon, and the footage of him traipsing around Auschwitz like an amateur spy is just depressing and horrifying. That said, in fairness to Leuchter, the one thing I missed in the film was any real questioning of the idea of making Holocaust denial a crime to begin with. Morris, who always perks up when presented with dueling evidence and legal arguments, gets tangled up in the minutiae and skirts around some of the central issues, one of which is that a guy was going to jail simply for something he wrote. Don't get me wrong, I have little enough sympathy for the thoroughly unpleasant Ernst Zündel, but I'm also not very comfortable with criminalizing speech, no matter how offensive. Leuchter does insist that he leapt to Zündel's defense as an advocate of free speech, but it sounds pretty lame coming from him, and Morris doesn't really press the issue.

Otherwise, Mr. Death is interesting for the way Morris subtly links Leuchter's new "career" as a white supremacist mascot to his previous job designing death penalty systems. One of the funniest threads running through the film is Leuchter's open admission that he had little to no qualifications for any of the work he was doing in the prison system—prisons just kept hiring him based on his work in totally unrelated areas. He'd worked on an electric chair, so of course he could design and repair gas chambers, and lethal injection systems, and gallows, and so on. I think Leuchter started to believe his own hype, to think that he could do just about anything with a little research. It's this overconfidence that got him in trouble in the end: sure, he could become a forensic investigator probing the secrets of a 40-year-old prison. Why not? It couldn't be too hard, right? He's an expert on this stuff. What a tool; in many ways the biggest problem with this film is that Leuchter is such an easy target. It's no fun beating on a guy who's already so beaten down and pathetic.

JB: You know, I wasn't quite sure what I found lacking in Mr. Death, but your last line nails it. There's no thrill of the chase in this picture. At best, there's the thrill of the absurd, but it's a sad thrill, given the context. I also agree that Mr. Death passes up some opportunities for deeper examination. You mentioned how Morris skirts the issue of the criminalization of speech, and it's in that same portion that Morris also is arguably too deferential to Leuchter's justification for his Auschwitz project. Leuchter claims the only reason he got involved was because he thought Zündel was being unfairly prosecuted. If that's true, it reveals a whopping amount of bias. On the one hand, Leuchter's alibi absolves him from being a fervent revisionist, but on the other hand it implicates him as a hack researcher. Put the pieces together and Leuchter's aim wasn't to examine Auschwitz; it was to create a reasonable doubt about the presence of the gas chambers. He already knew what he wanted to discover before he ever took a chisel to a piece of brick.

Additionally, I find it a little disturbing that one interviewee has no role in this picture except to show up and call Leuchter an anti-Semite. Leuchter might indeed be anti-Semitic, but there isn't much evidence for that here. To conclude that anyone who doubts all or part of the Holocaust must hate Jews is pretty closed-minded, actually, because it doesn't make room for any other explanation (like complete stupidity). Mr. Death, without ever apologizing for Leuchter, builds a compelling case that he was drawn to the modest fame he received as the expert on a controversial subject. Thus Leuchter's actions are entirely self-serving. He wasn't interested in hating Jews. He was interested in disproving history. He wanted to be to the Holocaust what Stephen Hawking was to black holes. And that's what happened. Leuchter became, to a select audience that included himself, The Guy Who Proved Auschwitz Didn't Have Gas Chambers. Once his identity was established, there was no room to change his position. Being wrong wouldn't have just invalidated his Auschwitz research, it would have invalidated him.

It's a rather tragic story, really, and part of me winds up feeling sorry for Leuchter because he's so utterly pathetic. He's one of those guys I look at and wonder if his life would have been profoundly different if, figuratively speaking, he had made the third-grade baseball team. His need to prove himself, to be a somebody, led him to—without malice, in my opinion—fan the flames of anti-Semitism around the world. That he's so oblivious to the flaws in his arguments and to the damage he caused is sad, and it's also what makes this film so interesting. Leuchter stands in stark contrast to Morris' next subject, Robert McNamara, who one could argue left a far larger path of destruction in his wake, and who was far more deliberate in his actions, but who endears himself to us with his self-awareness, reluctant though it tends to be.

EH: Yes, if Fred Leuchter is Morris' most pathetic antihero, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is one of his most complex and self-conscious. McNamara is a fascinating figure, and a historically significant one. He was instrumental in US military policy during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War—first as a military advisor and architect of the firebombing raids on Japanese cities, then as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. As usual, Morris simply lets his subject speak, an especially wise choice in this case because McNamara had never before commented at such length, and with such candor, about his involvement in controversial military policies and actions. In many ways he reveals himself as an intelligent, thoughtful man, a man who fully understands the consequences of his actions, and who is, for a high-level political figure, unusually engaged with issues of morality, responsibility and the possibility of making mistakes. He admits again and again that he and those around him made mistakes, even grievous ones, like the mistaken "attack" on a US ship that triggered the escalation of the Vietnam War, an attack that seemed doubtful and confused even when it was first reported, and which later turned out to be entirely non-existent. McNamara is strangely candid about things like this, and yet also disturbingly nonchalant—like, oops, we just started a war, we were wrong, oh well.

As a result, this film is a fascinating tug of war in which McNamara vacillates between rationalizing his actions and acknowledging the horrors perpetrated on his watch. Despite his engagement with moral issues, with the tragic consequences of such mistakes, he continually refuses to take responsibility himself. About the firebombing raids over Japan, he says that he does not think that his report about the inefficiency of American high-altitude bombing led to the new policy, even though he was advising his superiors to make these raids more "efficient," to maximize the amount of Japanese death and destruction for every American life lost. About the Vietnam War, when asked directly about the responsibility for it, he places it on Johnson, qualifying and hedging but basically saying that it was all Johnson's fault. About the authorization of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, he says he doesn't remember, that he doesn't think he personally authorized it, though it happened under his watch, and also, by the way, that he wouldn't have authorized it if he'd thought it was "a crime." He does not say, which you would expect any contrite, ethical person to say, that he would not have authorized it if he'd known it would kill and give cancer to US soldiers—instead he just says he wouldn't have authorized it if he'd thought it was illegal. It's not that he wants to do the right thing, per se; he just wants to do the legal thing. He wants, more than anything, a clearly delineated rule book for war, a way to reduce gray areas, to reduce his own capacity for choice. Despite his moral rhetoric, it's not ethics that guides him, but legality. And if he needs laws to stop him from doing something, doesn't this indicate an absence of innate moral strictures?

McNamara never actually takes responsibility, and Morris doesn't press him much—perhaps because, as can be seen in the brief epilogue, McNamara clams up when pushed too hard about Vietnam. By mostly just letting him talk, Morris gets a surprising candor and unguardedness from his subject, so that the truth often shows through the justifications and excuses and rationalizations. And when it doesn't, Morris helps bring it out, either through his occasional interjections of pointed questions and comments, shouted from offscreen in his characteristic brassy voice, or through his potent visualizations.

JB: The thing I like about The Fog of War is that it feels like a boxing match. The interaction between Morris and McNamara isn't combative, necessarily—there aren't a lot of punches thrown—but they do dance around one another with their eyes locked in and their fists cocked and ready. The film is broken up into McNamara's 11 "lessons," and at the end of each segment, I find myself expecting to hear the ringside bell. Boxing has been called "the sweet science," and interviews like this one fit that description, too. For example, regardless of whether McNamara sat for several interviews or filmed everything in one shot, Morris' time with his celebrity subject was obviously limited. (I imagine the naked mole rat guy will talk to you whenever you want.) Thus, even though this isn't a live event, the clock is always ticking. Morris hears it, and that's why he prods McNamara from time to time, pushing the issue. McNamara hears it, and that's why he knows that he can filibuster, so to speak, when the questions get tough.

On that point, my principle frustration with the film has nothing to do with the film itself but with the reactions it inspired. Critics raved about The Fog of War and many of them made the mistake of taking McNamara at his word. Some pointed out his shaky ethics, but the consensus seemed to be that McNamara purged his soul and straightened up his record. That's naïve. McNamara doesn't necessarily comment with candor; he comments with "candor." It's absurd to think that he's without an agenda, as if such a calculating man would suddenly let his guard down and speak without thinking. I suspect McNamara isn't capable of that kind of unfiltered expression. Most people aren't. (Mike Tyson is the rare exception, which is why James Toback's Tyson is so psychologically titillating.) So I think it's a mistake to assume that McNamara's latest version of the truth is any purer than previous versions, yet that's the way many critics framed this film.

That said, I don't think Morris was snowballed by McNamara. As we've discussed, his films thrive on contradictory testimonials. I suspect Morris would actually be bored by his material if he thought McNamara gave us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Certainly I find The Fog of War more compelling because of its ambiguities and shadows. I like trying to read McNamara, trying to figure out when he's in spin mode and when Morris cracks his surface to reveal something more intimate.

EH: Actually, Morris lucked out and got quite a lot of interview time with McNamara: over 20 hours spread out over several days, which speaks to how comfortable Morris can make even his most cagey subjects. It's hard to imagine the canny McNamara spending that much time talking with anyone else, and I hope some years from now Morris is able to stage a sequel with the equally evasive Donald Rumsfeld. Like you, I don't think McNamara cleansed his soul here. He is more forthcoming than one would expect, but he's still dodging, still trying to rationalize his actions, still trying to clear himself. Morris, as usual, lets the words stand whether they're the whole truth or not, and merely provides the context for the audience to judge McNamara for themselves.

In that respect, the most stunning sequence is a rapidly edited montage that mixes together various reports, charts and tables of figures about Vietnam with concrete photographic evidence of the devastation of the country. Casualty charts are followed by harrowing depictions of corpses lined in rows, reports of "houses destroyed" are followed by images of cities laid to waste, burning homes and rubble. This brutally effective montage cuts through the bullshit that McNamara so often erects around the horrors of war—he's a man who thinks in facts and figures, who thinks in the abstract of "efficiency." Morris attempts to expose the horror of such terrible efficiency, which turns the destruction of human life into a bloody, fiery science. At its best, this film refuses to allow McNamara's abstractions to exist independently of the concrete harm they caused. If McNamara often uses Orwellian doublespeak to gloss over the ugliness and brutality of war, Morris won't flinch away from answering these euphemisms with hard visual evidence.

JB: Indeed, Morris doesn't flinch. At one point, as McNamara discusses bombing raids and the inherent difficulty in determining how much destruction is too much, Morris inserts a special-effects shot of blue numbers falling toward a black-and-white aerial photograph, each digit symbolizing the multiple casualties any bomb might inflict. It's a chilling metaphor, and a creative one. Then again, later on in the picture, Morris' metaphorical tangents are more pedestrian. His too abundant and too literal shots of falling dominoes (Domino Theory, get it?) grow tiresome, for example. The same way he overproduced A Brief History of Time, perhaps in an effort to compensate for Hawking's immobility, here Morris does too much to compensate for his lack of interviewee diversity.

Having said that, though, The Fog of War is the Morris film that best underlines the effectiveness of using artistic tangents as emotional palate cleansers. No matter what B-roll footage or dramatic reenactments Morris uses in place of a talking-head shot of McNamara—regardless of whether the metaphorical flourish is interesting or entertaining—when we return to McNamara the film receives a jolt of energy. It's as if Morris' subject is suddenly without armor, as if the camera can see into his soul. When McNamara holds his thumb and forefinger close together to illustrate how America was this close to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or when he tears up at the thought of selecting Kennedy's gravesite at Arlington Cemetery, McNamara seems naked, vulnerable. In my mind, that's the trademark of a Morris interview: vulnerability.

EH: Vulnerability's a good word for it, and nowhere is that quality more apparent than in Morris' most recent film, Standard Operating Procedure. Robert McNamara was a wily and evasive interviewee for Morris, but the subjects of this film—most of them young men and women who had served in the U.S. military in Iraq—don't have McNamara's poise or savvy. When the disgraced soldiers of Abu Ghraib prison appear in front of Morris' camera, they seem defenseless, broken, their emotions running away from them as they talk about their time in Iraq, the things they saw and did. I think it's safe to say that, however much she tries to justify herself, Sabrina Harman shows a great deal more of her inner self than McNamara did; she's much more vulnerable before the camera.

Harman, the girl who appeared smiling and giving the infamous "thumbs up" in the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, is arguably the central figure of Standard Operating Procedure. Morris has a lot of interviewees here, both those who participated in the abuse and those who were on the scene less directly, but he keeps returning to Harman, letting her story provide the narrative backbone of the film. I think he centers the film around her because he sees in her the qualities that again and again draw him towards the unique people who appear in his films: a certain ambiguity in her motivations, a combination of self-awareness and rationalization, the internal contradictions of her personality. It's difficult to reconcile the Harman who appears in this film—smart, soft-spoken, morally conflicted, aware of the consequences of her actions and contrite for the damage she's caused—with the girl who could pose grinning and sticking up her thumb next to the corpse of an Iraqi prisoner.

The other soldiers in the film have various unconvincing rationalizations for their actions (Lynndie England lazily shifts the blame squarely onto fellow soldier Charles Graner, apparently a hypnotist who could remove other people's control over their own actions) or else express no remorse whatsoever (Javal Davis says nothing they did to prisoners at Abu Ghraib was all that bad). But Harman knows that what was going on was wrong, and based on the letters she sent home to her "wife" Kelly, she seems to have known it all along. She maintains that she was merely documenting the abuse, hoping to expose it later, but this is only convincing up to a point. Why did she still participate? Why, in the photos, does she always look like she's at a really fun party? Why didn't she just turn in the extensive evidence she'd already amassed by the time the scandal finally went public? Morris doesn't answer these questions: he simply turns the camera on this seemingly gentle, intelligent young woman and asks his audience to resolve the contradictions for themselves.

This is Morris' usual method, of course, but I wonder if it serves him quite as well here as it has in the past. He asks some hard questions about what went on at Abu Ghraib, and if nothing else the film is a fascinating set of character studies, but I often found myself wishing he'd push a little harder, delve a little deeper, follow up on some of the threads left dangling. Maybe I would've felt the same way about The Fog of War if he'd made it at the height of the Vietnam War. There's something about the urgency of a contemporary conflict that demands greater directness, meeting the big questions head-on rather than hinting at them beneath the surface. There comes a point where I wonder: is Morris' circumspection a sign of subtlety, or merely the evasiveness of an artist who wishes to avoid making too definitive a statement?

JB: That's an important question. My answer is that I'm not quite sure what Morris' cautiousness indicates. Many things, I imagine. I mean, even if it's true that Morris intentionally avoided making "too definitive a statement," there could be various motivations for that. Perhaps Morris wanted his film to be as profitable as possible. But maybe he avoided fire-and-brimstone techniques because he wanted people on both sides of the aisle to listen instead of assuming a defensive posture. As an artist, Morris would have every right to make this a personal film in which he explicitly articulates his opinion, and it takes guts to pull that off. That's true. But it also takes courage to require an audience to engage with the material in front of them. As much as Morris seems a little like Harman, standing back, being conveniently quiet amidst a period of unrest, I'd argue that what America needed more than a lecture was a film that challenged us to think for ourselves. The George W. Bush era was marked by years of being told what to think by an administration that withheld evidence that might have cast doubt on those directives. In this picture, Morris takes the opposite approach. He gives us the evidence and then challenges the audience to react. That's a valid approach, and not necessarily the proverbial easy way out.

With the caveat that I didn't see The Thin Blue Line when it was released and therefore can't truly appreciate how groundbreaking it was in terms of technique, I think Standard Operating Procedure might be Morris' greatest accomplishment. It's a film that political junkies probably could spend hours picking apart, making counter arguments and complaining about Morris' selection of interviewees, but that's what makes it ballsy. Morris makes a statement just by attempting this film against the backdrop of controversy. Yes, there are issues Morris could have explored in greater depth. (Taxi to the Dark Side serves as an outstanding companion piece to Standard Operating Procedure because it analyzes the deep psychological trauma that can result from all those supposedly mild (and legal) harassment techniques like forced standing, sleep deprivation and sensory overload.) But if you wanted to give someone an idea of what happened at Abu Ghraib and the complexity of the situation, wouldn't you hand them a DVD of Standard Operating Procedure? For all its coulda-woulda-shouldas, isn't it rich and challenging as-is?

Personally, I am horrified that our military was involved in these events, but I also understand why they happened. If college kids make faulty decisions powered by nothing stronger than alcohol and the need for acceptance, can I really blame these soldiers of similar age and maturity for disobeying their better judgment in a time of war, in an environment where conformity is demanded, in a setting where the chain of command is always respected? I cannot. I would like to think that I would have behaved differently than these soldiers, and I don't think they should be automatically absolved of their transgressions. However, I won't insult them by pretending I have any idea what it was like to march in their boots. Morris' film helped me find sympathy for these soldiers while also crystallizing the unacceptability of their behavior. The photos of Harman giving a thumbs-up or England cracking a smile while holding a prisoner on a leash? They provide all the damnation that's required. For Morris to further castigate his subjects would make this film about his rage instead of their misdeeds, which were indicative of a larger and even more revolting corruption. In moments of chaos and corruption, we look to leaders to emerge to show us the way, yes. Morris could have chosen to be that kind of leader. That said, I don't think he needs to be that guy holding a bullhorn and thumping his chest. That's what we have Michael Moore for.

EH: Before we go any further, let me say that I agree with much of what you just said. In many respects, Standard Operating Procedure is a great film, and surely one of the definitive statements to emerge from the Bush era thus far. I'm not looking for Michael Moore chest-thumping or fist-pumping here, and there's much to admire in Morris' more balanced, distanced approach, in his ability to see an issue not just from both sides (as though there could only be two for a complicated situation like this) but from all sides. Actually, though, I think you misunderstood what I was looking for when I wished that Morris would've pushed a little harder. I'm not looking for Morris to "further castigate" the soldiers who appear in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. You're right, they've been punished enough. His approach to Harman, England, et al is judicious and open-minded, never losing sight of their crimes while also allowing their own voices to be heard.

Where I think Morris could have been more aggressive was in providing additional context for the actions of these soldiers. He hints at this in places: the idea that what these soldiers were doing was not just isolated horseplay, was not their own idle invention, but was in fact part of procedure. Were they "just following orders," to resort to the cliché? Morris doesn't delve much into the question of responsibility higher up the chain of command, doesn't dig to find out if the "breaker" interrogation teams were really ordering the kinds of prisoner abuse made notorious by Harman's photos. There is a deleted scene on the DVD in which Tim Dugan talks about how he suspected that the interrogators were the ones who ordered all the humiliation and beatings and everything else that went on. He says that the young soldiers were just following orders from higher up. I mean, if you have someone making a direct, specific accusation like that, on tape, don't you follow up? Don't you research that? You certainly don't cut it from the finished film, editing around it to include the end of Dugan's remarks (when he says that he thinks the young MPs are being set up and "thrown under the bus") but eliding the earlier, more specific accusations. Morris also leaves for the deleted scenes some accounts of shocking incidents not often associated with the prisoner abuse scandal, like one soldier's jaw-dropping story of prison guards firing indiscriminately into crowds of prisoners gathered in a courtyard.

It's possible that Morris' desire to remain outside of his film, to take a stance of objectivity, prevents him from pursuing this material further. Maybe he wants to stick to just the established facts as much as he can, not pushing beyond what's already known. I can understand that. Or maybe he simply couldn't get any more information, which is likely given how tight-lipped everyone involved would be. But whatever the reason, the result is that the crucially important question of how far up the chain of command this mess spreads remains a lingering ghost at the fringes of the film, popping up here and there but never really taking center stage. I could just be wishing for a different film than the one Morris made, which is a fine work in its own right, but it does feel like he let some opportunities pass him by, focusing too much on the individual responsibility of those most immediately involved at the expense of a broader image of institutional responsibility.

JB: OK, that's a good distinction, and the deleted scenes you mention demonstrate that Morris had footage in the can that would have allowed him to push the envelope a little more had he wanted to—it wasn't like he couldn't get his subjects to open up. But I still wonder if Morris was savvy enough to realize that had he included Dugan's explicit accusation, his film might have generated a media firestorm around that specific allegation, thus rendering the rest of the film almost moot. It's sad that Morris would have to consider that approach in order to maximize the ultimate effectiveness of his picture, but such is the state of our generally oversimplified and sensationalized media culture these days.

Maybe this is my own bias coming through, maybe I brought this idea to the film with me, but I left Standard Operating Procedure with no doubt whatsoever that these soldiers were at least implicitly ordered to create the environment of fear and debasement that eventually got them in trouble. Unless Morris could have traced these events back to Rumsfeld's desk through something more than circumstantial evidence, I'm not sure there's anything to gain by going farther. (Though, wow, if only!) But now I'm curious: Are you more disappointed by what Standard Operating Procedure isn't than fond of what it is? Where, roughly, do you think it ranks among his filmography? And is Morris becoming a better filmmaker with age, or no?

EH: Despite my reservations about Standard Operating Procedure, I do think it's a good film as-is. If it doesn't quite do everything I wish it did, what it does accomplish is worthwhile enough. As you said earlier, if I was going to hand someone who'd been living under a rock a quick primer on Abu Ghraib, this would probably be it. As for whether Morris has become a better filmmaker or not, I honestly can't say. He's certainly honed and developed his craft over the years. But his filmography is somewhat scattershot, broken up by TV work that I mostly haven't seen, and his two best films, in my opinion, are The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, which are separated from one another by nine years in which he did very little other film work. His most recent two films are solid, probing political examinations, and they're great films in their own ways—but I wouldn't say they represent a marked progression from his earlier work in aesthetic terms.

In fact, one thing that's increasingly bothered me about Morris' work is the development of his use of music. From The Thin Blue Line onward, he's treated his scores like he's laying down carpet, and this can be both a good thing and a bad thing. He's fortunate in that he generally gets very good scores, and very similar scores, whether he's working with frequent collaborators like Philip Glass or Caleb Sampson, or in Standard Operating Procedure with Danny Elfman. Glass' score for The Thin Blue Line set the template for all Morris' future scores: pulsing, nearly constant, propelling the narrative, lending a relentless forward motion to the storytelling. It's a brilliant fusion of score and storytelling, and it's a combination Morris has sought for all his subsequent films. His scores serve him well, but as a result he leans on them too heavily at times, never letting the music rest, seldom allowing silence to fall, always this insistent pulse in the background. This works beautifully in The Thin Blue Line, and in a different way, Sampson's gleeful circus pastiche fuses symbiotically with the fast-moving cut-and-paste aesthetic of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. In some of Morris' other films, the score occasionally becomes overbearing—Sampson's score for Mr. Death is distracting, jarring against the images rather than enhancing the story, while in Standard Operating Procedure the near-constant Elfman music is deadening after a while. There's little variation in the pulse of the music, and thus little emotional rise and fall. By increasingly relying so heavily on his music, Morris risks letting the music set the mood and the rhythm of his film rather than shaping that himself through his images.

JB: I think you're absolutely right. Then again, it's part of what puts the Morris in a Morris film. When I listen to Bob Dylan I often find myself wishing he'd go a little easier on the harmonica, but it is what it is. Same thing here. The benefit of Morris' rigid style is that he doesn't have a single dud amongst his collection of feature length documentaries. Some are better than others, of course, but they're all worth seeing, and that's impressive. Still, especially when watching Morris' entire collection in close succession, as we both have recently, the formulas become somewhat tedious. Rewatching The Fog of War a week ago, I found myself wondering if Herzog should have been brought in to provide voice-over in place of Morris' typical music cues. "And now, you feel mewved," he'd say.

Speaking of being moved, on Errol Morris' website there is a prominently displayed quote from Roger Ebert: "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more." That's quite a compliment. I agree with Ebert that Morris is a master filmmaker, but I can't say my admiration for Morris goes that far. I enjoy all of his films, I really do, but I don't crave them. I'm interested in his pictures, but I'm rarely deeply moved by them. I find Morris' movies fun to think about, but they don't call me to return to them. Perhaps that's because several of Morris' films are arguably bigger than they deserve to be. As Fast, Cheap & Out of Control proves, Morris can make just about anything interesting, and yet repeated viewings can expose the slightness of the material, causing Morris' treatment of his subject matter to seem almost foolishly overblown. But this is a quibble. Because in the silence between musical eruptions, in the stillness between dramatic recreations, Morris' films are irresistible. No filmmaker has ever gotten more out of pointing a camera directly into the eyes of his subjects and asking them to talk.

EH: Yes, I often found myself wondering if some of my reservations about Morris' work are at least partly the result of having watched so much of his oeuvre in such a concentrated period of time, both revisiting films I'd seen before and catching up with a few that were new to me. There are few directors who are so focused and consistent in their approach, and because of that he's probably not well-suited to binge viewing of his entire filmography. He tends to approach every subject with the same enthusiasm, the same intensity, whether he's talking to a guy who really loves naked mole rats, or a former Secretary of Defense. In terms of the individual films, this is great, but all that bombast can be wearying in the long run, and watching so many of his films in such a short period of time emphasizes the similarities between them and the limits of his aesthetic. Of course, that's not really Morris' fault: I'm sure he didn't envision anyone sitting down and watching all his films over the course of a couple of weeks.

Still, at his best Morris does move me, and thrill me, and engage my intellect. His films never fail to make me think, which is no small thing. Moreover, when I want what Morris has to offer, there's really nowhere else to go: there's no mistaking his films for anyone else's. That's no small thing, either. Even if Morris' idiosyncratic style is sometimes frustrating or overbearing, it's also what makes his films worth seeing.

_________________________________________
Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler.

Ed Howard chronicles his film viewing at Only the Cinema and also maintains The Film Blog Calendar.

Read more!

Dixie Twist: In Praise of Whatever Works

By N.P. Thompson

[Whatever Works is now playing nationwide.]

There’s a brief sequence somewhere along the middle of Woody Allen’s Whatever Works that is just about the most perfect scene imaginable in a film comedy. In it, a professor of philosophy at Columbia (played by the Irish actor Conleth Hill, flawlessly impersonating a New Yorker) and a Southern-fried matron named Marietta (Patricia Clarkson, in the ripest, most delectable role she has had onscreen to date) have gotten together at his place for drinks. Earlier, the auburn-curled, hot pink-clad, Mississippi-accented Marietta, bursting into the movie like a parody of William Inge archetypes, has announced that, in response to her husband’s infidelity, “I turned to Jesus in a deeper way than I ever have!” She clutches, as proof, a copy of the Holy Bible in one hand and a glass of darkly stained hard liquor in the other. Marietta might caricature a certain flower of Southern womanhood, yet as Allen conceives it and as Clarkson portrays her, the send-up is absolutely spot-on. At a subsequent lunch with her errant daughter Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), Marietta preaches her deeply held beliefs (“Abortion is murder!”) yet manages to magnetize the salt-and-pepper lion-maned Leo (Hill) all the same. He admires her breasts, her long legs, and acting on the notion that “a woman is easier to get in bed if she’s a member of the National Rifle Association,” he asks her out.

Listening to the Stan Getz recording of Jobim’s “Desafinado” in Leo’s apartment, Marietta shows him her Kodak snapshots of Melodie as a child. To her, the objects are one thing: cute pix of her daughter as a darlin’ baby girl. To Leo, they’re something else entirely. He praises the texture and composition of Marietta’s photographic eye; he speaks, to his guest’s bemused wonder, of the images’ “haunting quality,” which she, in turn, quietly regards as “a gift the good Lord Jesus gave me.” The moment becomes a lovely meeting of opposites, and I don’t think it had such an entrancing effect on me merely because I’m a photographer or because I’m a born and bred Georgia cracker: there’s something understatedly brilliant in how the acting, writing, and directing merge to create a scene of two persons having the same conversation yet talking about entirely different issues. And there’s another level on which it feels at one with the zeitgeist. I saw Whatever Works in late June during a particularly exciting week for the Republicans—Sanford had disappeared (and probably ought to have remained incognito), but more to the point here, it was a few days after Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) had adamantly refused to take a meeting with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. He already knew he was going to vote against her confirmation, he said, so why bother? A commenter on one of the political blogs got right to the heart of things when he or she rhetorically asked: Is Inhofe afraid that he would like her? That, if they actually met, he might find he and Sotomayor shared some common ground?

Whatever Works is an infinitely savvier movie than it’s receiving credit for in the mainstream press. Although laced with deliciously hostile lines, such as the above-referenced NRA one, Allen’s 30-something-year-old script has been retrofitted into a bouquet of calendula blossoms to the culture wars. There’s a nod to Obama (“a black man can get elected to the White House—he still can’t get a cab in New York City”) yet most of Whatever Works plays like Woody’s response to what we might call, the other names for it notwithstanding, Palin’s America: this is how dumb, redneck behavior looks to a septuagenarian New York intellectual. And when Ed Begley Jr., in a sensationally good performance as Melodie’s conservative Christian father, enters the film in its final third, dropping to his knees to beg for Jesus’s forgiveness in the flat that his daughter shares with the atheist Boris (Larry David), the movie transcends its origins as a May-December infatuation between a misanthrope and a beauty pageant contestant and emerges as a well-aimed pie-in-the-face to right-wing hypocrisy. Begley uses his voice in an exciting way; he doesn’t just apply an all-purpose Southern accent, he puts some butter in the sauce of his already husky timbre, speaking with a slight mush-mouth effect, rendering his effusions to Jesus or his lambasting homosexuality as “a sin against God” as deliriously rich as those elected clowns who parade their religion onto the Senate floor. Begley doesn’t have anywhere near the screen time of David or Clarkson or Wood, yet he wastes not a second in springing to life a fully realized creation.

As Melodie St. Ann Celestine (is the surname an homage to the longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley?), Evan Rachel Wood brings something new to the Allen repertoire. I liked the young Ms. Wood well enough in Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, although, given the disparity in the roles they were playing, she could not help being overshadowed by the flashier Nikki Reed. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for her sensuously witty turn as a Mississippi runaway finding and losing and finding herself within the Woody terrain of a New York never-neverland. Melodie may be Allen’s most sympathetic, most touching heroine; certainly, she is without peer in his long line of leading ladies. If Téa Leoni, in the underrated Hollywood Ending, proved to be Allen’s fiercest onscreen match-up since Diane Keaton, Wood fulfills the promise that the worthless Scarlett Johansson never delivered. She has a succulent comic delivery, such as when fresh-off-the-farm Melodie declares her crush on the vituperative Boris (“I don’t like normal, healthy men. I like you”) yet she’s loveliest in a moment of romantic confusion, drawing on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in order to fight her way out of the clouds. If her accent may be a trace over the top, Wood, a North Carolinian, even so comes across as more authentically Southern than the overblown Amy Adams in Phil Morrison’s empty set of postures, Junebug.

Like Marietta, Melodie’s pure caricature, but in a manner that feels unerringly accurate. I’ve known this girl, or some variation of her. It’s amazing how well Allen nails Southern stereotypes, especially in an early scene in which Melodie describes to Boris her first sexual experience as “a nice moment behind the tent at the fish fry,” yet one that’s an “unforgivable sin,” negating her chances of getting into Heaven. I grew up having a similarly absurd notion of sin drilled into me by Nixon/Reagan-worshipping, fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists, so Melodie’s fears didn’t feel the slightest bit exaggerated. I see nothing but well-observed truth in what Allen holds up for target practice. (And it isn’t at all surprising that the generic, Yankee reviewers who’ve dismissed this film have failed to divine anything. Such critics of limited range remind me of the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense: They see what they want to see, which isn’t enough to snatch the veil of their myopia.)

Much of Whatever Works unfurls in hypnotically long takes, as in the late-night conversations between Melodie and Boris that capture the feel of after hours, soul-baring sessions. Allen’s occasional rapid cuts, such as going from night to day, from a soft ballad to a Dixieland band with banjo and brass, in the transition to Melodie’s new job as a dogwalker (more precisely, the dogs are walking her), are equally well brought off. Allen’s direction has a taut assurance, a lean quality absent from his work for some time. Whatever Works has none of the sluggish spots that marred the worthwhile Cassandra’s Dream or that dominated Match Point and Melinda and Melinda. This is as good a moment as any to address the following: the conventional wisdom on Allen films of the past decade has, typically, been dead wrong. His most ambitious work of the new century, Anything Else, was also his most widely derided. Conversely, he’s accrued seemingly endless accolades for Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Match Point, both of which I consider audience-pandering dreck. Whatever Works lacks the protean highs and symphonic reach of Anything Else; it’s a smaller-scaled chamber piece, yet more consistently pleasurable. There are no dud lines about Sara Lee cheesecake or “new” electric can-openers to gum up the proceedings, but nevertheless Larry David’s Boris, as scathingly vicious as he presents himself to us, can’t begin to compete with the nightmare woman of Christina Ricci’s Amanda. (Anything Else “failed,” I think, because neither critics nor audiences were quite ready for such a clinically on-target portrayal of feminine soullessness, at least not coming from Woody Allen.)

The tête-à-têtes here with David and Wood run the gamut from brutal to wistful, often within the same scene. “What is that song?” Boris asks of a plaintive tune hailing from an old movie on television as it wafts through their apartment. “They played that song the first time I went out with Jessica,” he says, remembering his ex-wife. The melody, in a silvery, mournful orchestration, lingers on throughout the hectoring Boris subjects his roommate to. At some point in the slow, minimalist waltz, a cornet solo enters over the strings—it’s timed to be at the precise instant that Melodie admits her attraction to Boris, and Allen’s low-key audacity is breathtaking. In a later scene, Boris pops in a CD; the same lushly romantic song plays once more. Allen gives it ample space under the dialogue, so that we get to know the sinuous lines of its yearning motifs and, like Boris, to fall under its spell. The song turns out to be James P. Johnson’s “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)” as recorded by Jackie Gleason’s orchestra with the sublime Bobby Hackett on cornet. (Allen has used Gleason and Hackett to evocative effect before, notably on the soundtrack to Alice, where their rendition of “I Remember You” underscored Mia Farrow’s ghostly reunion with a long-dead lover, personified by Alec Baldwin.) This time, Melodie, who has absorbed Boris’s pessimism and somehow made his negativity uniquely her own, filtered through a prism of Southern belle, honey-bunch wiles, tipsily complains that friends her own age “like everything.” She faults them for not having Boris’s astringent critical faculties; this isn’t only one of the funniest aspects of Whatever Works, it’s also true-to-life that this gullible girl would wind up being influenced by the man who takes her in off the streets, regardless of how inappropriate the borrowings are.

A similar alchemy occurs with David playing the Allen stand-in: he prattles off Allen’s machine-gun one-liners, yet David makes them his own, the great, forceful rhythms of his baritone voice a natural conduit for such lovely rants. The stunning opening sequence, a stand-up routine of Boris directly addressing, taunting, challenging us, reaches an apocalyptically gleeful pitch when he excoriates the NPR-liberal phonies among us for blithely ingesting the horrors in the news, then “you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free-range chickens!” David’s tumultuous spewing of these lines, in tandem with his jostling movements up the summer sidewalks of lower Manhattan, are delightfully suggestive of a prizefight.

The movie isn’t without a couple of lapses. Why does Boris—who rails against clichés in speech—believe that Melodie will have her musical horizons expanded by listening to, of all things, Beethoven’s dead-tired warhorse Fifth Symphony? Surely, someone of Boris’s exactitude has more discriminating taste than that—or is this one of Allen’s private jokes, that Boris isn’t really so advanced? The cinematographer Harris Savides, who has done innovative work for Jonathan Glazer and Gus Van Sant, disappointingly doesn’t break any new ground here. Savides achieves one incandescent effect in a brief tracking shot of twilight settling over a marina, taking us from the harbor to a houseboat interior in one majestic glide. Be that as it may, at a New Year’s Eve party, Savides’s camera goes gauzily—not purposefully—out of focus.

The actors, however, right down to the smallest roles, are exactly right. So engaging are John Gallagher Jr. and Henry Cavill, as potential distractions from Melodie’s admiration for Boris, that I wished their characters were taken further. The British Cavill, in particular, in a scene at an outdoor bazaar, is so unassumingly yet self-confidently handsome that he seems like a God. Still, it’s Clarkson who has the field day here. When I heard that she was going to work with Allen again, after the degrading role he saddled her with in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I couldn’t fathom why. But with Marietta, a real part to sink into, Clarkson exudes an irresistible comic élan; it’s hard not to love a middle-aged woman who bubbles and fizzes, “See ya, darlin’!” when a man asks her for a date. She’s just had her faith in herself, in her attractiveness, revalidated—and isn’t that enough for us, too?

____________________________________
House contributor N.P. Thompson publishes the site moviesintofilm.com, where he recently panned the Oscar-winning Japanese film Departures. Moreover, he photo blogs at WordPress.

Read more!

Right Hand/Left Hand: Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing

By Matt Zoller Seitz

_____________________________________
Released 20 years ago this month, Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing was one of the most controversial films of its time. It was praised in many quarters for its script, direction, photography, acting and music, and singled out by some prominent critics as a rich and multifaceted drama about racism, police brutality and the dynamics of an urban community. Others condemned it as contrived, unrealistic, shrill, even irresponsible — a potent work of propaganda intended to stoke racial resentment, perhaps even incite violence.

That there were no notably violent incidents at theaters showing Do the Right Thing is a matter of public record. But one doubts this was merely a lucky break on Lee's part. A close look at the movie's construction confirms not just its entertainment value and political relevance, but its generosity of spirit. Do the Right Thing is not a film-as-argument. It's a film about arguments. More specifically, it's about the roots of the grievances people hold and the anger they unleash.
_____________________________________

To view the video essay at The L's website, click here. To read a transcript of the narration, click here.

Read more!

Zen Pulp: The World of Michael Mann, Pt. 2—Lifetime subscriptions: Michael Mann's honor-bound individualists

By Matt Zoller Seitz

______________________________
This is the second in a five-part series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opened July 1. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. To read the author's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

Read more!