Friday, May 19, 2006
The Cutting Room Floor
We just watched, via Netflix, Tell Them Who You Are, a 2005 documentary made by the son of Haskell Wexler about his father — a man whose occupation was described as “cameraman” by Elia Kazan. Wexler knew a lot of famous people and had worked on many well-known movies, so there is the celebrity spectacle as a draw. The movie was really meant to be about a father and a son.
Wexler is a cantankerous man — not because he was 80 when the movie was made, but because he was a cantankerous man. He was being fired from the set all through his career. The reason for this choppiness was Wexler's strong left-wing convictions, which infected everything he said and did. Well, okay, it had nothing to do with convictions or being left-wing, it had to do with his personality. Wexler would have done well if he had grown up in our time — contentiousness was his true métier. If ever two people were separated at birth it was Haskell Wexler and comic book guy Harvey Pekar. From facial structure, to physical gesture, to psychological slant, these two generate the same vibe.
Wexler was born to great wealth; he lived through the Depression without a ripple in his privileged life. But he never identified with power — rather he rejected it in the terms of the 'Sixties, the rhetoric still fresh to him in his eighth decade.
Sorting through the issues in the movie leaves you mystified as to intent and desired cinematic resolution. The son wanted approval clearly, and in the end, he got it. The father, never having lost his abrasiveness, softened. But no one said anything that offered a sense of context and depth. You were left finally with Hollywood types who were nakedly inarticulate and completely unaware.
We watched this movie on the heels of Jim Cameron's Aliens Of The Deep, which was so promising. Terminator was such an entertaining, well-done movie; Cameron's documentary about the astonishing creatures of the deep sea seemed a perfect match. Same deal as above: the ego of the guy. Cameron, with money and the seduction of moviemaking, lured NASA scientists, Russian scientists, experts on the subject of deep sea flora and fauna.
The movie itself had about fifteen minutes of the spectacular morphological imagination of Nature in its full splendor — the creatures were astonishing; even with the saturation of media images of monsters and CAD moviemaking, you laugh and are delighted watching these creatures. That was fifteen minutes.
The rest of the one hour and thirty minutes was devoted to Cameron, and then there was more Cameron. You watched him explain to a NASA scientist the problems she would have with remote vehicles on Mars. He had himself filmed discussing “ambient oxygen” with a scientist. There were shots of faces peering through portholes saying “Oooo, look at that”. All the guy had to do was film the stuff and then explain what you were seeing. But there was almost no effort to describe or give a fuller understanding of the few creatures that made it into the Hollywood spotlight. They were lost on the cutting room floor.