An Oscar rarity -- at least three of the nominated documentaries are outstanding and deserve to win! Can the Academy find a way to snub them all?
Clockwise from top left: “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon),” “Encounters at the End of the World,” “Trouble the Water,” “The Garden,” and “Man on Wire.”
Read more in Salon’s Oscar guide
It’s traditional for every stakeholder in the documentary-film world to spend the winter months bitching and moaning about the Academy Awards. (It’s certainly a tradition that has served this column well.) In years past it often appeared that the voting members of the Academy’s documentary branch were not human beings at all, but cyborgs teleported in from a semi-mythical film world of the past. They had never seen any actual documentary film made since 1990, reasonably enough, and had a strong preference for movies about wide-eyed tots who play the violin and recite Frost poetry, while escaping from a Nazi death camp.
Thing is, for at least the last three or four years, those of us who love to complain about the docu-Oscars have pretty much been forced to put a sock in it. It’s a sad state of affairs, but there’s no avoiding it: The best-documentary category has become almost respectable! I mean, as in every awards ceremony since the Lascaux judges spurned that guy who painted the swirly, surrealist mammoth, there are grounds for whinging. I’ve already expressed my dismay that neither Margaret Brown’s “The Order of Myths” nor Laura Dunn’s “The Unforeseen,” two tremendous examples of American filmmaking from way outside the L.A.-New York nexus — and two of my personal favorites from the last year — even made the short list.
As with every other Academy Award category, the eventual winner emerges from a complex calculus of Hollywood self-congratulation, emotional impact and marketplace heft that has little or nothing to do with lasting cinematic quality. I really don’t believe that any serious person would look back at 2007 and 2006 and pronounce that “An Inconvenient Truth” or “March of the Penguins” were the best documentaries of those respective years. Simply put, they were the docs that made the biggest splash: One made a zillion dollars, and another focused the public’s attention on an issue of world-historical importance. Last year, of course, in order to confound people like me, the Academy turned around and gave the big prize to Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side,” an undeniably important film about Bush-era detainee abuse that made less money in theatrical release than any Oscar-winning film of recent memory.
My confoundment continues into 2009; now that we’re down to five nominees, I see three plausible (and eminently deserving) winners, one delightful surprise that has absolutely no chance, and one left-field, wild-card, insert-another-randomness-cliché-here entry that possesses a certain Hollywood mojo. The cynical gambler in me sneaks a black chip onto the table for “The Garden,” the random-mojo movie, which might just steal the statuette next Sunday night. But then I revert to what I’ve believed all year, which is that the powerful post-Katrina documentary “Trouble the Water,” a real-life yarn of struggle and heartbreak set in one of America’s most forgotten neighborhoods, has a date with destiny in this transformative year.
I’ll be delighted with that result, even though I’d probably rank “Trouble the Water” third among the four nominated films I’ve seen. Rather than proceeding into some tedious discussion about what makes a documentary “good” or what the Academy Awards are supposed to signify, let’s cut to the chase. Since I’ve previously written about four of the nominated films (follow the links!), and have been unable to track down the fifth, this part should be easy.
“The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” A gorgeous, impressionistic film more than 20 years in the making, longtime cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ directing debut is the biggest surprise among this year’s nominees. Kuras is well respected in the film industry (she shot “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “I Shot Andy Warhol,” among other pictures), but this lyrical study of a Laotian family’s American odyssey has neither the present-tense topicality nor the clear narrative through-line Academy voters seem to favor.
Kuras’ co-director is also her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, who swam across the Mekong River from Laos to Thailand as a 12-year-old in 1979. His mother and seven of his nine siblings eventually followed him to a new life in New York, although his mom says now that if she’d known then what American life was really like, she’d have gone back, even to the poverty and repression of communist-ruled Laos. Around 1985, Kuras got to know Phrasavath in Brooklyn, N.Y., and what they’ve emerged with two decades later is a tragic, elegiac film essay that interweaves an intimate family story and a larger narrative about the unpredictable long-term effect of an almost-forgotten war. It’s a beautiful movie and you should absolutely see it and I’m extremely surprised it was nominated. Oscar odds: 1,000-1.
“Encounters at the End of the World” I could profess to be shocked by the fact that Werner Herzog has never previously been nominated for an Academy Award in any category, but why bother? Herzog has lived mainly in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, but both his documentaries and his rare narrative films remain ferociously idiosyncratic. It isn’t that he’s some kind of anti-Hollywood rebel, after 66 years on the planet and more than 50 feature films; it’s just that he’s never concealed his low opinion of the mainstream film industry or the fact that he doesn’t care what it thinks about him.
All that is by way of explaining A) how remarkable it is that “Encounters at the End of the World” was actually nominated this year, and B) why it probably won’t win even though it should. In my judgment this metaphorical and literal voyage to Antarctica is one of the best films of Herzog’s career, maybe the best. He hears the prog-rock stylings of Weddell seals under the Ross Sea ice, meets a pipe-fitter descended from Aztec royalty and a philosopher turned forklift operator, and interviews a profoundly depressed biologist who describes life in the primordial seas at the dawn of creation as a Darwinist horror story.
As I wrote last June, Herzog’s documentaries have edged ever closer to some kind of atheistic spirituality, as if he is paying tribute to the creative genius of a God he doesn’t believe in. “In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ could have been a quirky human-interest documentary, a National Geographic special or a New Age-flavored meditation on the mysteries of nature and the interconnectedness of everything. Perhaps only Herzog, veering from disagreeable crank to generous shaman and back again as he does, could combine all three in such an acrid, beautiful mixture.” And there’s really no way I can explain the suicidal penguin, except to say it was simultaneously the most tragic, most ridiculous and most noble thing I saw in a movie all year. Oscar odds: I dunno, let’s say 5-1.
“The Garden” One of the ultimate Oscar sleepers of recent decades, this film hasn’t been on any critic’s radar screen and to my knowledge has no theatrical distribution or broadcast deal. Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary concerns the still-unresolved fate of South Central Farm, a 14-acre community garden in Los Angeles that was started after the Rodney King riots of 1992. Although the garden grew into a beloved local institution, the city council abruptly cut some kind of backroom deal to sell the land for development, reportedly at less than market value.
Outside of Oscar voters and a handful of festival attendees, almost nobody has seen “The Garden,” and that includes me. Since it covers a hot-button issue in the film industry’s hometown and features a certain amount of Hollywood firepower — Daryl Hannah and Danny Glover appear in the film, and executive producer Julie Bergman Sender is a well-connected insider — you can’t count this out. There have been very few reviews; Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it a “potent human drama” and a valuable case study in hardball politics. Oscar odds: 3-1.
“Man on Wire” James Marsh’s film about Philippe Petit, the eccentric French wire-walker who strolled between the twin towers during an amazing week in 1974 — the next day, Richard Nixon resigned — is the most skillful and entertaining of this year’s nominees. In terms of Oscar handicapping, that isn’t really a positive, given the Academy’s strong propensity to reward social-issue films. Marsh and Petit are well aware that the film arrives in a certain context — those buildings aren’t there anymore — but the film is framed as a puckish adventure story, or a heist film by Truffaut, rather than as a history lesson.
It helps that the story has an amazing central character; then and now, Petit comes off as “a compact, intensely charismatic little guy who seems to be part acrobat, part madman and part Zen master or medieval mystic,” as I wrote last April when the film played at Tribeca. His “physical strength, balance and coordination are well beyond normal human capacity, but it’s clear that what he loves about wirewalking, more than anything else, is the intense mental concentration, the absolute requirement that you stay focused on where you are right now in time and space.” In the end, I found “Man on Wire” much more than entertainment and something closer to therapy or magic; it restores those buildings to us, stripped of their terrible history and remade as symbols of joy and transcendence. Oscar odds: 2-1.
“Trouble the Water” What you’re talking about with “Trouble the Water,” which tells the amazing story of Kim and Scott Roberts, a poor African-American couple who lived through the worst Hurricane Katrina flooding in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans — and videotaped it — is human heroism and tragedy on a scale that swamps whatever limitations the movie around them may possess. Generally, the reviews of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s film (including mine) have been ecstatic, but in private a fair number of documentary mavens have discussed the lumpy, uneven quality of “Trouble the Water,” especially in its post-Katrina sections, or wondered about the filmmakers’ ambiguous relationship with their subjects. (Kim Roberts shot almost a third of the footage we see on-screen, but is not considered its co-director or co-creator.)
In the end, I can concede some of those points while concluding that they’re nothing more than minor caviling around the edges of a movie that offers its audience a tremendous emotional experience, and a chance to face its own prejudices about poverty and race in a spirit of healing rather than a didactic atmosphere of shame. It’s a stereotype-shattering story of hope, not a gloomy litany of despair. As I wrote last August, people like Kim and Scott Roberts “don’t generally have their own voices, or any other kind of autonomy. A sometime drug dealer, raised in dire poverty by a mother who died young of AIDS, may be understood by way of abstract categories: She’s a symptom of criminal pathology or a symptom of racism, a victim or a perpetrator. She is hardly ever going to be seen as a complicated individual utterly free of self-pity, who believes herself fully in charge of her own destiny.” Oscar odds: 1-3.
Do we still need Black History Month?
Three great documentaries air, including "More Than A Month," where one filmmaker explores his conflicted feelings
A still from "More Than a Month"
Black History Month is an idea that filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman finds passé. In his documentary “More Than a Month,” which premieres Thursday on PBS’ “Independent Lens,” he walks around with a signboard that says END BLACK HISTORY MONTH and receives plenty of dirty looks. But he also gets more support than he suspected — after he explains that history should be part of the American story, told even during months with more than 28 or 29 days.
As he goes about his somewhat whimsical quest, some caution him that without that annual anchor, there’d be even less black history taught than before. He takes his campaign on the road; peers into the home of the month’s originator, Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.; meets with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; and goes to Virginia to see what black history means to big fans of the Confederacy.
Eventually he gets more serious about his task, realizing that while history may convey how we were, the way we tell history conveys how we are. And he’s had one direct effect: His mother, an activist, moves the date for a black history performance she had been planning out of February to help demonstrate that it is part of the fabric of U.S. history all year round.
One day, even television networks may spread their black-heritage documentaries beyond the confines of February as well. Unfortunately, two remarkable documentaries air at the same time Tuesday in many markets.
After demonstrating that he’s a sensitive observer of life in black America with “Hoop Dreams,” Steve James is back with “The Interrupters” – a more ambitious film that follows a fearless group of activists and amateur psychologists determined to end urban violence. It makes its national TV debut this evening on Frontline (check local listings).
That James and author Alex Kotlowitz (“There Are No Children Here”) decided to focus on Chicago at the precise time its youth-killing rates and lurid viral videos made it a national news story put them in the center of the cyclone. Their alarming footage, from the center of exploding violence and retribution, put the superficial approach of the national news media and government officials — who did little more than hold press conferences — to shame.
Even more remarkable are the counselors and community-minded people, many of whom learned their lessons in the streets, who put their lives on the line to defuse the mayhem out of a regard for love and doing what’s right.
Among them, Ameena Matthews deserves to be some kind of national heroine for her street sense, humor, decency, insight and bravery, which seem to change everyone she approaches. No matter how explosive the situation, she can enter, speak sensibly and have people listen.
James and Kotlowitz do treat their subjects seriously, listen to what they have to say and show how the activists are getting things done. For the inches of progress made before our eyes, it’s a hopeful film.
“The Loving Story,” on HBO, may seem like it is tied to Valentine’s Day. But it’s only providence that the couple at the center of the story is also named Loving.
But loving is the key. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were both members of a small community in Virginia where whites and blacks freely worked and socialized. They met and fell in love, and like anyone else might do, got married.
But there were laws in Virginia, as there were in more than a dozen other states, outlawing any such mixing of races through marriage, using a word that is as ugly as the prejudice, miscegenation.
Somebody called the cops and the happily married duo were hit with a felony charge in 1958 — and a year in jail – which would be suspended if they’d just leave the state. Any visits back to see family or friends would have to be done individually, lest they risk arrest. They decided to fight the law, not only for their own sake, but as Mrs. Loving says in the sweetest possible way, for other people as well — because “it isn’t right.”
“The Loving Story” is in some ways the exciting case of the two young American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who agreed to take the case on and brought it to the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s only because lawyers like to talk, especially looking back at what they can now see was the biggest case of their lives. Although there is a surprising amount of footage of the Lovings in the film, they never do say very much. They just want the right thing done. And in the end, it is.
The two are not around to tell their story, though one of their daughters is. He died in a car accident in 1975; she in 2008 at 68, surrounded by family and friends. The last anti-miscegenation law wasn’t repealed until 2000 in Alabama. Theirs is a love story that hasn’t been fully told previously — and may not have had a showcase had it not been for Black History Month.
The civil rights battle ignored by the U.S. media
The documentary "Black Power Mixtape" tells a counter-history of the 1960s, through the eyes of foreign journalists
A still from "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975"
It was tough enough to track the social and political upheaval of the 1960s through domestic news coverage, let alone to pay attention to what the rest of the world was reporting. But journalists from abroad were fascinated by the roiling changes — and often saw it quite differently.
Though U.S. network coverage of civil rights cruelties helped rally the country against the worst offenders in the South, coverage of revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party more often took J. Edgar Hoover’s extremist stance that it was the most dangerous internal threat to the U.S. Rarely did it look at the accomplishments of its free breakfast programs, community organizing and determination to stand up to police harassment and brutality.
Swedish newsmen and filmmakers who didn’t follow the FBI line came to America to learn what they could, looking at life in largely segregated black America, talking frankly and seriously with black leaders and closely following their trials.
Footage of the era, said to have been sitting in a Swedish basement for three decades, became the eye-opening documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” making its U.S. television debut on PBS’ “Independent Lens” Thursday night as part of its Black History Month series.
The modernist title owes in part to filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson using modern-day commentary, from musicians in many cases, to accompany the found footage. Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots add their contemporary revolutionary musing among commentaries by professors and historians.
The wealth of Swedish footage owes in part to the Panthers’ desire to see their movement as an international one, or one that certainly relied on support from outside the U.S.
It is the Panthers’ Embassy in Algeria where Eldridge Cleaver holds court, for example, far from the threat of FBI invasions. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to Stockholm to meet King Gustaf VI Adolf that are well preserved, and King’s traveling partner Harry Belafonte recalls the meeting.
Some of the earliest footage in the film shows a young Stokely Carmichael speaking in Stockholm in 1967, stating in the simplest terms the recent history of black movement in the U.S., carefully stepping beyond the nonviolent action approach by King.
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience,” he points out coolly. “The United States has none.”
In some ways, it is the footage of Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and honorary “prime minister” for the Panthers, that is the revelation of “The Black Power Mixtape.” How suppressed has his voice been over the years, even at a time of black history mining?
It’s certainly eye-opening for modern-day commentator Kweli, who exclaims, “He has so much passion and fire inside of him,” yet remains quite cool. “He seemed like a regular dude.”
After telling reporters in Stockholm, “I’m not as patient as Dr. King,” Carmichael takes over a Swedish interview of his own mother in Chicago to get to the point: The family’s struggles and limited opportunities can be boiled down to the fact that they are black.
One gets the sense that Swedish journalists enjoyed visiting black ghettos, where they tried to get a taste of life as they paused for interviews with Huey P. Newton and Kathleen Cleaver.
The coverage was noted in the U.S. as well, when TV Guide in a cover story complained about its negativity. Swedish reporters interviewed the story’s writer, balancing it with the view of director Emile de Antonio, who dismisses TV Guide as “an absolute nothing magazine.”
Officially, Sweden had been so critical of America’s role in Vietnam that the U.S. pulled its ambassador from Stockholm in 1968 and ended diplomatic relations with the country altogether for a time in 1972, after Prime Minister Olof Palme compared the bombings of Hanoi with the worst atrocities of Nazis.
Whatever the diplomatic relations, Swedish journalists certainly took the black revolutionaries more seriously and were plainly excited to be the first TV reporters to talk to an imprisoned Angela Davis. Still, because they worked from the same script, the question soon boiled down to: Do you have to use violence to reach your goals? Davis, receiving her first media visitor, was plainly annoyed by this, in just about the only footage that’s in color rather than black-and-white.
“When somebody asks me abut violence, I just find it incredible,” she says. “What it means is that the people who ask have no idea what people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”
The revolutionary tone of the film may provide grist for those on the right who erroneously see PBS as some kind of government-funded left-wing propaganda machine. When was the last time Louis Farrakhan was given a forum to talk about white devils?
But “The Black Power Mixtape” qualifies as a social history of a revolutionary movement, one quashed by a mid-1970s drug infusion to black neighborhoods that film participants are quite sure was caused by the government.
More than that, the modern voices in the film are resolute that lessons of the past need to be learned as the struggle goes on.
Wind power: Renewable resource, or another corporate scam?
A fascinating new film about one small-town political fight takes on the pseudo-green wind industry
A still from "Windfall"
In telling the story of a small-town political fight over wind power, Laura Israel’s fascinating documentary “Windfall” at first seems like another entry in the long laundry list of post-”Inconvenient Truth” doomsayer environmental films. Indeed, “Windfall” has some of the rural, homespun feeling of Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated “Gasland,” which helped ignite a national debate over the natural-gas extraction method known as fracking. Israel’s film also offers a direct riposte to Bill Haney’s “The Last Mountain,” in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is seen promoting wind power as a clean alternative to the dirty and destructive combination of mountaintop-removal coal mining and coal-generated electricity.
Viewed through a long lens, “Windfall” is about much more than the hidden costs and unexpected side effects of wind-power generation, or about a citizens’ uprising in the tiny town of Meredith, N.Y., in the Catskill region 150 or so miles northwest of Manhattan. (Mind you, both are gripping stories.) It’s about the American tendency — and very likely the human tendency — to look for magic-bullet solutions to complicated social and economic problems, where none are available. It’s a microcosmic version of the political divisions — between left and right, environmentalists and free-marketers, corporations and citizens — that have virtually paralyzed our republic. It’s a reminder that whenever a virtually unregulated industry (as in this case) offers capitalists a chance to defraud the little guy and make a bundle, they’ll do it. It’s a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just — and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.
In the abstract, wind power sounds like a good thing to nearly everybody. It relies on an essentially infinite resource, carries little or none of the obvious environmental downside of coal or oil, and presents no Fukushima-style doomsday scenario. Wind generation has become a major focus of venture capital; Israel includes video of a hearing a few years ago at which T. Boone Pickens told a congressional committee that he could imagine, in the relatively short term, 20 to 25 percent of the country’s electricity demand being fulfilled by wind and other renewables. I have no way to evaluate that claim, but the experts Israel consults in the film think it’s hokum. Given the inherently inconstant nature of wind, they argue, it’s not a stable or permanent solution to our energy crisis, and is unlikely ever to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.
Setting aside the discussion of whether it’s worthwhile to pursue wind power in the first place — and we shouldn’t really set that aside — there might be locations in the Great Plains states, the Southwest and the high western deserts where wind farms, even on the enormous scale imagined by Pickens, would do no great harm. But as people in Meredith and numerous other communities in the wind-friendly rural Northeast and Great Lakes region have discovered, living anywhere near those gargantuan wind-harnessing engines is quite a different matter. These days, the typical industrial wind turbine is around 400 feet high — the height of a 40-story building, or twice the length of a jumbo jet. The blades alone can weigh upward of 35 tons, and the entire assembly anywhere from 150 to 400 tons (resting on a platform of concrete and rebar, which itself may be 30 feet deep and weigh several hundred tons). It’s an enormous construction site, culminating in a high-voltage electrical device, that emits a 24/7 whoppa-whoppa-whoppa noise and incessant low-frequency vibration, and is topped with a brilliant flashing light. By daylight, there’s the nightmarish strobe effect — the vast rotating shadow that falls across an entire neighborhood when the turbine is between you and the sun. (While the question of whether it’s actually unhealthful to live near a turbine is unresolved, it’s definitely unpleasant.) If your neighbor put one up in her backyard without asking permission, how would you feel?
As it happens, I have a personal interest in the events and location of “Windfall,” because I spend summers in a town just a few miles from Meredith. But nothing about the town or its surrounding area (in Delaware County, N.Y., one of the poorest and least populated counties in the Northeast) is untypical of rural America. Meredith has a mix of longtime residents and big-city emigrants, and its longtime dairy-farm economy has largely collapsed in recent years, partly replaced by an unstable mixture of tourist-oriented businesses, craft initiatives and boutique organic farming. These social tensions came to the fore, predictably, during the wind-power debate, with the major landowners and dairy farmers on one side — hoping for the rather skimpy royalties paid by the corporate investors in wind — and many “recent” New York City arrivals, convinced that the region’s economic future depends on its unspoiled landscapes, on the other. (I use the scare quotes because anyone who’s lived in Delaware County less than 30 years is often viewed as a newcomer.)
People on both sides of the issue in Meredith assumed at first that the anti-turbine forces were an elitist minority, partly because the town board had always been dominated by the same landowning families, and partly because wind-power companies had signed people up to secret agreements that forbade them from discussing anything about the relationship. What ensued was a fascinating lesson in democracy (and a version of the same lesson the Tea Party and its supporters may learn later this year). After 826 people — more than half of Meredith’s total population — signed a petition opposing the town board’s pro-development policy on wind turbines, it turned out that the people who thought of themselves as the “real” residents were in the minority, and the jig was up for the wind industry in this one tiny corner of America. Yet as one newly elected board member reflects at the end of the film, nobody came out of this fight feeling good. A formerly harmonious community is now bitterly divided, and the Mitt Romney-style venture capitalists of wind power will just move on to the next town and sell their pseudo-green poisoned chalice to somebody else.
“Windfall” opens this week at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago. It opens Feb. 9 at the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah, Feb. 24 at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, Ore., and March 2 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with other cities and festival screenings to follow. It’s also available on-demand from cable, satellite and online providers, including Amazon, iTunes and VUDU.
Sundance opens with “riches to rags” story
The festival begins with the incredible true story of the tycoon, the beauty queen and their massive dream house
A still from "The Queen of Versailles"
PARK CITY, Utah — According to the mayor of this ski-resort town, which is a famous outpost of crunchy liberalism smack in the middle of the most Republican state in the union, it took the arrival of thousands of outsiders for the Sundance Film Festival to get the place back to normal. Last year the Utah Legislature passed a resolution declaring climate change a hoax, as Mayor Dana Williams told us before a Thursday night screening. Since then, Mother Nature has retaliated: It has barely snowed in the Wasatch Range this winter, leaving the region’s fabled slopes almost bare. But a day that began with drizzling rain and temperatures in the 50s ended with a healthy dose of the white stuff, while we all sat inside in overheated auditoriums watching movies.
Sundance has ditched its former tradition of having one main opening-night film, instead screening four different pictures, two American (a narrative feature and a documentary) and two foreign (ditto). This is all to the good, and avoids invidious comparisons with more Hollywood-centric festivals — but there’s little doubt this year that photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s documentary “The Queen of Versailles” was first among equals. The unbelievable-but-true story of Florida real-estate tycoon David Siegel and his ex-beauty-queen wife Jackie, who nearly went broke while trying to build the biggest house in the country, is like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.
After everything starts to go south for the Siegels, Jackie has to take their enormous brood of children — or some of them anyway; I believe they have eight — back to her upstate New York hometown on a commercial flight. (Previously, they had gone everywhere in their private jet, of course.) But she’s still baffled when she gets to the Hertz counter at the airport in Elmira, N.Y., and asks, “Who’s my driver?” She grew up in modest middle-class circumstances and hasn’t been nosebleed-rich for that many years, but she has totally forgotten that regular people don’t have chauffeurs.
And the thing is, I never felt that Greenfield was mocking Jackie, who comes across as a likable, commonsensical middle-aged mom (albeit one with considerable, um, cosmetic enhancements) and is in many respects the heroine of the movie. She really is an ordinary person who has led a life that goes beyond the unlikely or the bizarre to the flat-out impossible. Her previous jobs included cocktail waitress and nursing-home attendant, and here she is pumping out kids and managing a 26,000-square-foot house for a sour and distracted rich guy 30 years older than her. (That’s not the uncompleted house modeled after the Palace of Versailles; that one was supposed to be 90,000 square feet.) By the end of the film, with most of the household staff laid off, Jackie’s job includes wandering around scraping dog crap off the carpeting in room after room, and discovering how many of her children’s pets have died from neglect.
David Siegel, who made his enormous fortune by selling time-share vacation rentals in places like Florida and Las Vegas (and Park City) to working- and middle-class people who couldn’t quite afford them, is apparently suing Greenfield over his portrayal in the film. Specifically, he objects to the Sundance brochure describing “Queen of Versailles” as a “riches-to-rags” story, and while I’m no lawyer, I suspect he’d have a better case if that weren’t exactly how he puts it in the movie. What David really doesn’t like, I suspect, is seeing himself on-screen as a brooding old cuss with no life outside his work and no time for his own children. He shuts himself up in a cluttered den with a widescreen TV and stacks of papers, trying to find a way to rescue both his Orlando dream house and his Vegas condo tower, now deeply underwater. (Time-share lending was essentially a species of subprime mortgage, and when credit dried up so did Siegel’s business.)
Still and all, Greenfield does allow us to see Siegel’s human qualities, especially the fact that he’s chasing the same ersatz vision of luxury, the same unattainable simulacrum of the good life, that he’s been selling to poor people one Vegas weekend at a time. He’ll probably never finish his Versailles, but even if he does it’ll have cockroaches and the same ghastly paintings of his family in pseudo-medieval finery. Siegel and his wife are of course entirely unaware that their attempt to build a replica of Versailles in Florida, and fill it with “Louis XIV-type antique furniture,” is a cruel and altogether too appropriate historical joke. But that’s really not their fault; they live in a country that has become a parody of itself.
Pick of the week: The amazing American journey of Harry Belafonte
Pick of the week: Day-O! How the singer-activist blended Caribbean shtick and fierce political passion
Harry Belafonte (Credit: HBO)
For several generations of people too young to remember the civil rights era, Harry Belafonte may seem like a baffling figure, familiar mainly from protest marches seen on television and Caribbean-shtick pop songs heard on grandma’s car radio. Who is this elderly African-American celebrity with the Italian-sounding name and the aristocratic demeanor? Why did he become famous in the first place, and why does he sometimes come off as the self-appointed radical conscience of black America? Most famously, Belafonte ignited immense controversy both within and without the black community by repeatedly suggesting that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were the “house slaves” of the George W. Bush administration.
Those inflammatory remarks are not mentioned in “Sing Your Song,” the rich and fascinating new documentary about Belafonte’s life and times, which was written and directed by Susanne Rostock but has clearly been authorized and approved by Belafonte and his family. We learn a great deal about Belafonte’s central role as a towering figure of the early-’60s civil-rights movement, when he was confidant and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. But also unmentioned are his visits to Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, his warm relations with the Soviet leadership before the fall of communism, or his assertion that George W. Bush was a greater terrorist than those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
For the record, I believe that Belafonte’s remarks about Bush are entirely defensible, if impolitic. What he has to say about Barack Obama’s first term can only be imagined, because the current president’s name, startlingly, is never uttered. (His father’s is; Barack Obama Sr. first came to the United States from Kenya by way of a Belafonte-sponsored scholarship.) I don’t bring up Belafonte’s past associations or overseas visits in order to red-bait him (as his ideological opponents have done exhaustively over the years). My point is that “Sing Your Song” is a vital document of American history, which I recommend to everyone, and also an attempt to massage the patriotic legacy of a complex and polarizing figure.
One thing Rostock’s film makes abundantly clear is the fact that Belafonte had the opportunity to become a high-profile and sometimes strident social activist because his first incarnation as a celebrity was about as wholesome and non-polarizing as a black man could possibly be. Born in Harlem but largely raised in Jamaica by his grandmother, Belafonte ultimately brought the island’s folk songs back to America as mid-’50s pop-calypso hits like “Matilda,” “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” and of course “Banana Boat Song,” which you’ve definitely heard even if you don’t know what it’s called. (Irrelevant footnote: Belafonte’s story speaks to me personally in all sorts of ways, but partly because it parallels that of my own father, who was born in the same month of 1927 a few dozen blocks to the north, and then was sent back to his own grandmother on a somewhat colder island.) With his trademark tight pants and unbuttoned shirt, the muscular Belafonte became a sex symbol to millions of white women and girls at a time when interracial marriage was still impossible in many states, and toured with a mixed-race folk group to cities where black audiences had to watch from the balcony.
I realize this is stretching a little, but Belafonte in the ’50s — viewed strictly as a cultural archetype — was something like an early version of Obama, an articulate and handsome light-skinned African-American who spoke standard English better than most white people did. (To this day, Belafonte’s pronunciation of the word “theater” is redolent with cultural specificity; he says it as Bette Davis or Lynn Redgrave would have.) But as Belafonte himself explains it in the film, his path to stardom was at least partly calculated. Near the beginning of his performing career as a folk singer, he remembers, his idol Paul Robeson came to see him backstage at the Village Vanguard and told him: “Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.”
If anything, “Sing Your Song” may convey the impression that Belafonte’s career as a pop singer and stage and film actor — a shameless ham, it must be said — was simply a means to an end, a tool to be used against Jim Crow and apartheid and other forms of racism and injustice around the world. While I suppose it’s true that Belafonte’s close working friendship with King, or his later relationships with Nelson Mandela and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, may weigh more in the scales of history than “Banana Boat Song,” he honestly may be selling himself a little short. Sure, some of Belafonte’s calypso numbers may be cheesy, but he was a generous singer with a huge spirit, who pioneered multiculturalism and “world music” long before anyone used those words. The performers he introduced to mainstream audiences included Odetta, Nana Mouskouri and, most famously, Miriam Makeba — and his 1962 album “Midnight Special” featured a then-unknown harmonica player named Bob Dylan. (In the movie, you’ll watch him perform “Hava Nagila” on network TV in 1959, which became part of his concert repertoire for years. You can think that’s silly or think it’s awesome; I vote for both.)
Belafonte’s early association with Robeson (who was without doubt a communist) will raise in some viewers’ minds the long-cherished right-wing assumption that Belafonte was or is a treacherous Red seeking to destroy the American way of life. Even bracketing the fact that the two things are not connected — most American communists were not traitors, just as most American Muslims do not support terrorism — the evidence is pretty thin. Even the right-wing investigative site Discover the Networks can go no further than claims that Belafonte was “aligned with the Communist Left” and that he “views America as an evil and profoundly racist nation.” Depending on your definition of “evil,” those vague and disputable terms could be used to describe all kinds of people, from Cornel West to Noam Chomsky to Roger Ebert (to me).
“Sing Your Song” never addresses these allegations directly, other than sourcing most of the FBI’s files on Belafonte to a shadowy figure named Jay Richard Kennedy (aka Samuel Solomonick), a one-time Communist Party insider turned showbiz executive and government informant. Kennedy was Belafonte’s manager for several years — while his wife served as Belafonte’s therapist! — and the two of them apparently fed the FBI some ludicrous “Manchurian Candidate” line about Belafonte being a double agent “controlled by Peking.” My Internet searches suggest that at least one academic is trying to write a book about Kennedy/Solomonick, and I can’t wait to read that one.
I don’t support everything Belafonte has ever said or done, but he’s a hugely important American dissident who’s been on the right side way more often than the wrong one, and who pioneered a path followed by many other activist celebrities, from Marlon Brando to Sean Penn and beyond. Even in this carefully staged self-portrait, we meet a man in his 80s who is aware of his failings as a husband and father (although his two youngest children, David and Gina, helped produce the film) and plagued by the thought that all his labors against tyranny and injustice have not nearly been enough. On one hand, he comes off as boundlessly optimistic, seeking to hand off the torch of rebellion to a new generation; on the other, since the 1980s he seems to have hardened and grown less tolerant of politics. He declined to attend Mandela’s inauguration as president of South Africa because of his rift with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and declined to attend Coretta Scott King’s funeral because Bush would be there.
With his physical health precarious, Belafonte keeps touring the globe, meeting with European hip-hop artists, L.A. gang members, prison inmates, Native American leaders and his own council of African-American “elders,” in search of some resolution or program that might reverse the global tide of neoliberal capitalism and pseudo-democratic police states. He’s a hero, all right, but not the kind who gets to ride triumphantly into the sunset at story’s end. More like the hero of a long-running tragedy, the kind of hero once summarized this way by the English socialist William Morris: “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant.”
“Sing Your Song” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York and the Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, Calif. It opens Jan. 20 in Santa Fe, N.M.; Jan. 27 in Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle; Feb. 3 in Denver; Feb. 10 in Albuquerque, N.M., and Bellingham, Wash.; Feb. 12 in Montgomery, Ala.; Feb. 17 in Hartford, Conn.; and March 16 in Minneapolis, with other screenings and venues to be announced.
Page 1 of 39 in Documentaries
Failure 
Arrested Development - Occupy Style 
Back from Burma (or is that Myamar) 
The GOP’s emerging Bob Dole problem 
Interview: Gary Oldman talks about his first Oscar nomination 
A match made on Craigslist adult services 
Can’t see the forest for the wood 
The things I carry 
When I lost the ability to type 
Pop art, the beaded edition 
The beautiful banality of high school 
The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks 
Demi’s last night out 
