Beyond the Multiplex

Documentary Feature

"Deliver Us From Evil" When I called director Amy Berg at her Los Angeles home, she was having an "Oscar moment." Someone had just showed up at her house with a pile of potential Oscar-night gowns, and she had to talk to me about her intensely serious and wrenching film about Oliver O'Grady, a former California priest who might have been the worst sexual offender in any Roman Catholic diocese of North America.

"I can only hope that getting this nomination keeps this issue in the spotlight," she says. "I'm a journalist and I know how these things work: There's a threshold for how much coverage the media can do on a given story, and this one has faded off the front page. This film can create a sort of sidebar to the bigger story. It can provide some acknowledgment for people that have been through something horrible" -- at least 100,000 victims of clerical abuse have come forward in the U.S., and everyone believes there are many more who have not -- "and it reminds us that all these people who hid the truth for many decades are still running the church and haven't answered any of the questions."

"Deliver Us From Evil" has been attacked as anti-Catholic in some quarters, but as Berg says, that response can only come from people who haven't seen it, and their opinion isn't valid. "We've been completely respectful of church imagery and of people's faith. The people we spoke to for the film want their church back. They don't want to destroy it, really quite the opposite."

"Deliver Us From Evil" has reopened theatrically in a few cities since its Oscar nomination, with DVD release still ahead. In terms of Berg's own career, she says, the nod is unlikely to mean a dramatic shift, but if it opens a few doors and gets her phone calls returned, so much the better. "I really feel fortunate. I want to tell important stories, and I have been lucky enough to find people who want to help make films that can shift people's consciousness." Before the next consciousness-shifting moment, though, she's got to pick out a gown -- and hit the Vanity Fair party on Sunday night.

"An Inconvenient Truth" Heard about this? It's pretty good. Al Gore is in it. Actually, the great story here is director Davis Guggenheim, a veteran TV director (episodes of "Deadwood," "The Shield," "Alias," "24," etc.) who parlayed this improbable idea into a worldwide hit. The world will be shocked if Guggenheim isn't clutching a statue on Sunday night. As director James Longley of "Iraq in Fragments" says (see below), it's a chance for Academy members to vote for Gore, and actually have him win.

"Iraq in Fragments" "There were times when I thought to myself, 'You know, this could turn out to be a good movie,'" James Longley says from his home in Seattle. "But in all honesty, the Academy Awards was not high on my list of concerns." Building character and incident like a narrative film, "Iraq in Fragments" follows three disparate stories in three different regions of post-invasion Iraq: one in a Sunni section of Baghdad, one in the Shiite heartland dominated by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and one in the Kurdish north. It's a marvelously compelling film and one all Americans ought to see.

"There's definitely a lot more interest in the film" since the Oscar nominations were announced, Longley observes. Hits on his Web site are 10 times higher, and people like me are calling him every day. "On the other hand, this is a documentary in a foreign language, with subtitles, and the audience that's willing to see that is pretty specific. Ultimately the people who were going to see my film were pretty likely to see it, with or without the Academy process."

Like everybody else in this category, Longley expects "An Inconvenient Truth" to win -- and after double-checking that voting has ended, he says that he doesn't especially want to win. "I'm not so emotionally wrapped up in the process that it's going to throw me for a loop either way, but it might be easy for me to say that now," he laughs. "It's almost ideal to be nominated and not to worry about winning.

"Getting nominated means that people are taking you seriously. You can get a meeting. The main issue in my life is being able to make my next film without going completely broke again, and that problem is solvable given the success of the current film. It might be great to win, career-wise, but just dealing with that also might take up a lot of extra time that I hope to use making a film."

"Jesus Camp" Given how leery Hollywood usually is about potentially pissing off the Christian right, it's remarkable that Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's alternately hilarious and terrifying documentary, largely set at a North Dakota camp for ardent evangelical youth, was even nominated. Of course, many of those Christian right people shut up about "Jesus Camp" after a while, most notably when the Rev. Ted Haggard -- who is presented here as a blow-dried, cynical bastard, and who led the charge against the film -- became a less desirable ally. This film ended up playing well in the big cities where we're all terrified of the Christian know-nothings, and not so well in the heartland (despite a noble marketing outreach), but that really isn't Ewing and Grady's problem. "Jesus Camp" is fundamentally fair and open-minded, and doesn't pretend to portray the evangelical Christian world in all its complexity.

"My Country, My Country" This moving and tragic portrait of an Iraqi doctor's family as it faces the crumbling social world of post-Saddam Iraq is definitely the more obscure of the two Iraq documentaries nominated this year -- and "Iraq in Fragments" director Longley went out of his way to praise it. "Let me tell you what should win this year," he said before getting off the phone, "and that's Laura Poitras' film, 'My Country, My Country.' What she accomplished is really significant, in showing us the educated, politically aware class of Iraqis who are really trying to reverse the downward slide in that country. And she came to Iraq, by herself, to make that film, after I had already decided it was too dangerous and gone north to the Kurdish country. That's the kind of courage the Academy ought to be honoring." I couldn't put it any better.

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