Play For Today: Documented

27 February 2009 | 10:44 PM

Slowly but surely I’m getting back into the swing of things around here. And while that doesn’t mean that I can boast that I’m now attending to my allegedly daily creative ritual, well, daily, it does mean that I’m at least thinking about doing it daily: didn’t Gandhi say something about being the change you wish to see or something? Yeah, I’m doing that. Ahem. Anyway, for this edition, I thought I’d flex some of my old film criticism skills again, if for no other reason than I feel a small sense of obligation to periodically demonstrate to my parents that my college experience brought me something other than canonical knowledge of all things Animaniacs. Enjoy:

I make no bones about it – I am completely predisposed to enjoy most documentaries. After all, the form is what originally made me want to be a film-maker, and to this day several documentaries remain in my top ten-to-twenty movies of all time. To me, a well-executed documentary challenges, entertains and informs viewers in ways that traditional cinema simply cannot – works of fiction, no matter how real-seeming, all require one to suspend their disbelief at some point. Not so with a good documentary, friends: it really is true that sometimes, you really can’t make this shit up. Anyway, it was with that in mind that, within the space of a week, I sat down and watched two different documentary films from 2008 – Bill Maher’s Religulous and Morgan Spurlock’s Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden. Surprisingly enough, both left me thoroughly underwhelmed.

I’ll admit that I’ve always felt a sense of uneasiness about comedian Bill Maher. I’ve caught his stand-up act from time to time over the years, and often tuned into his HBO show – Real Time With Bill Maher – and, while I often find myself agreeing with him, I always have to fight the urge to yell profanities at him through the television screen. It’s not about those things we disagree about: I’ve got a healthy dose of respect and admiration for lots of people (famous and otherwise) with whom I don’t see eye-to-eye on various issues. It’s not even that he has an odd kinship with right-wing attack-shrew (and total waste of a C cup) Ann Coulter, although I think I’d better understand a romantic relationship between a cobra and a mongoose. No, my issue with Maher is that he’s essentially an inverse copy of the blowhards on the right: he projects his own frailties onto those he doesn’t understand or agree with, then attempts to mock them, all the while making it all about him (while denying it’s about him). Maher’s always seemed to me to be a living, breathing example of why for me the ends never justify the means – if countering the vitriol and pandering of wack-a-doo conservatives requires being just as vitriolic and pandering, just in another direction, then count me out.

That said, I was actually curious to see Religulous, Maher’s globe-trotting documentary about the perils of religion. As someone who personally has no room in my life for religion, I was interested to see what our anti-hero found as he met up with kooks and Kabbalists from the Florida panhandle to the cradle of civilization. Would he see a common thread of xenophobia and self-isolation that ironically ties religious extremists together? Did he find some common ground that the faithful and the faithless can use as a foundation to build upon so our future doesn’t end up being a series of struggles for religious hegemony? Might he stumble upon people whose faith and actions are actually making a positive difference in the world? In a word, “no”.

And more to the point, Maher couldn’t give a shit. He set it out with the intention of making a film about how stupid religion is, and sure enough he did it. There was no transformation, either of himself or of his subject, along the way. In the days and months following the Iraq war, we all heard about the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the phrase “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” cropped up. Heck, Maher himself lampooned it on his show (and rightly so!) as evidence of a presidential administration drunk with power and willing to bend the truth to get what it wanted. Well that’s what we have here in Religulous, a film which starts out not with a hypothesis, but with a conclusion and then spends the next hour and a half illustrating its point. The fact that I largely agree with Maher’s conclusions is beside the point – it’s small solace knowing you’re right when it comes at the expense of seeing those who are wrong being goaded into putting on their passion plays. In the end, Bill Maher winds up telling us much more about his own discomfort and insecurities than the supposed ridiculousness of the religious folks he chases down for his film.

Unlike Maher and his movie, I came at Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden without an axe to grind against its director. I actually very much enjoyed Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s goofy and wide-eyed look at the perils of being a fast food nation. However, unlike his previous movie, Spurlock’s naivite in this film seems contrived and forced at best.

Where In The World… sees the director, upon recently discovering he’s going to become a father, channel his natural panic over the safety of his eventual progeny’s world into a one-man hunt for America’s most notorious enemy, OBL. Like Maher, Spurlock journeys around the world, ostensibly looking for the scourge of Tora Bora, but realizes that instead he should be looking for the common ground Americans have with the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world, people who we’ve been conditioned to believe want to see us deader than disco. In Spurlock’s case, it’s not that there’s no transformation involved: indeed, the transformation is the very crux of the movie. However, this elongated, cinematic eureka moment doesn’t feel genuine in the slightest.

As Spurlock “realizes” what the true purpose of his journey has been, it’s all one can do to not roll their eyes and say, “Well, duh, no shit, Sherlock!” Like Maher, Spurlock’s conclusion – albeit kinder-hearted and more uplifting – was pre-ordained before even setting out. In fact, the audience is left feeling like the director’s an asshole for leaving his wife to go through her pregnancy entirely alone, scared that her husband is going to get blown to smithereens by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan or a rocket attack in Israel. The film comes off as a very well-intentioned pantomime of Rodney King’s infamous “can’t we all just get along” line: it’s nice and all, but did it get us anywhere?

Both films, it should be noted, give us some really interesting moments. When the former head of the Vatican’s observatory sits down with Maher for a chat, we’re given a brief glimpse at someone who is able to gracefully keep his religious beliefs compartmentalized from his scientific knowledge. Maher also introduces us to two ex-Mormons who (now that they’re “ex’s”) have trouble even talking about Joseph Smith’s bizarre teachings (can you say “magic underwear“?) with a straight face. Spurlock, god love him, actually braves patrols in Afghanistan, meeting locals and soldiers to whom Osama Bin Laden seems about as consequential as the Tooth Fairy. He also speaks with a Wahhabist cleric in Saudi Arabia who simultaneously managed to make my skin crawl from fear and my belly ache from laughter.

Unfortunately, as humorous, poignant and intimate as some of these vignettes are, all they do is merely connect the dots of a line that was laid out for the audience before the opening credits even began rolling. In both cases, one doesn’t feel that they were brought along on a journey from point A to point B, but rather they were shown point B on a map and told, “trust me, it’s there – now eat your popcorn.”

Posted by Andy in Play For Today