.png)
I often find that more than any other type of film, creative choices can make or break a documentary. A false music cue or an overworked script can turn the most powerful story banal. You don’t find those slip-ups in Sundance as often as they occur in other places—all five of the current nominees for Best Documentary at the Oscars premiered at Sundance—but the festival also isn’t immune to those missteps either. In this dispatch are three works from the US Documentary competition that, to varying degrees, attempt to match a purposeful style to their important subject. Only one feels totally in line with that intent.
“Joybubbles” isn’t the type of groundbreaking work that’ll set Sundance ablaze. Its modesty and sincerity, which could easily be confused as saccharine, arrive with an assuming commitment to the spirit of its remarkable subject that it’s downright dream-affirming. The film concerns Joe Engressia, aka Joybubbles, a blind Floridian man whose unique ability to whistle over the phone connected him to a world larger and kinder than he could imagine. The documentary is a cradle-to-the-grave work, so it follows a standard chronological structure, taking us from Engressia’s lonely childhood, spent alongside his blind sister, to his rebellious college years, when he began his search for autonomy amid an environment hostile to people with disabilities.
Director Rachael J. Morrison’s presentation of Engressia’s story features considered aesthetics and a rich sonic language. She shares Engressia’s perspective through his home recordings, which often sound as if they were spoken into a telephone receiver. To visualize his recollections, Morrison employs a black, static-filled frame whose quirky variations also match Engressia’s sly sense of humor. His absurdity, as we discover, belies the trauma he’s faced. He tells us about the sexual abuse he endured at a Catholic school, his dream of living on his own in a high-rise with a pool, and his vision of bubble people, who filled him with warmth during his darkest days. Most importantly, he shares his deepest desire: to be employed by a phone company.
“Joybubbles” is attempting to fill several buckets: It’s a film about emotional wounds, disability, and the subculture of Phone Phreaks—people capable of manipulating the phone system. By trying to cover all those subjects, it sometimes strays from its primary story. But Engressia is such a warm spirit—you can tell why so many eventually connected with him via the taped answering service he made late in life—that his personality papers over narrative hiccups.
In J.M. Harper’s excessively rendered yet poignant Vietnam War documentary, the Black men of the F-51st gather one last time to share their collective past. They were the conflict’s first all-Black Long Range Reconnaissance team, earning the nickname Soul Patrol. That moniker became the title of Ed Emanuel’s memoir, which chronicles his and his comrade’s arduous experiences.
At times, “Soul Patrol” can be a harrowing viewing. Emanuel, Lawton Mackey, Thad Givens, Emerson Branch, Jesse Lewis, Willie T. Brown, Willie Merkerson, and Norman Reid each share why they joined the army. Some did so because their friends and family went—arguing that for Black families, it was often considered a badge of honor to have a son serving in the military—while others did so to escape jail time. These men also share how they were programmed to kill, and, in the case of one soldier, had to learn how to strike the complicated balance of de-programming oneself during leave and later re-compartmentalizing in the field.
A stylistically loud film, “Soul Patrol” does nothing subtly. The score, a constant barrage of strings crescendoing, overpowers us, dragging us from emotion to emotion. A hokey bit of visual symbolism within a supermarket inelegantly pushes for profundity, while the use of archival footage—whose flurry arrives topically rather than chronologically—feels ungainly.
The passionate responses “Soul Patrol” engenders from the audience occur despite the overcooked aesthetic choices (I’m still not sure why this film needed to be black-and-white). Nevertheless, Harper does make up plenty of ground through other keen decisions, such as interviewing the wives of these men to gauge the difficulties of living with and caring for them. He also managed to get some of these men on camera before they passed, saving a critical oral history that could’ve easily been lost to time. Those components, combined with the heartfelt, complicated recollections and revelations shared by these veterans, make for an emotionally piercing final twenty minutes whose aim is true and firm.
In Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans’ heavy-handed true-crime documentary “Who Killed Alex Odeh?,” the film’s title is a rhetorical question. Everyone knows who murdered him; it’s just a matter of getting anyone to care. Alex Odeh was the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) who was assassinated in a bombing of the ADC’s Los Angeles office in 1985. At the time, many suspected he was murdered for his pro-Palestinian stance and in retaliation for a late-night news segment where he attempted to explain, in empathetic terms, why a group like the PLO would feel desperate enough to hijack the Achille Lauro cruise ship. For those reasons, it was also assumed that the Jewish Defense League, a right-wing extremist group, dispatched Robert Manning, Keith Fuchs, and Andy Green to carry out the task.
These details aren’t a surprise to anyone intimately involved with the case. Nevertheless, for the last four decades, Odeh’s family has begged the FBI to track down, extradite, and convict the men responsible for his death. Though their pleas have fallen on deaf ears with the federal government, Israeli journalist David Sheen offers to find them. He discovers these men living in plain sight.
Once again, since there aren’t many new revelations to be gleaned about the case, it’s a bit of a stretch to call this film a true-crime mystery. Nevertheless, “Who Killed Alex Odeh?” follows a visual and sonic language common to these films. There’s the slow-motion archival footage used for dramatic effect, grim music cues to underscore every moment’s importance, and an editing style that is always looking to land a punch rather than to assuredly guide us through the heartache of a still-grieving family.
It should be noted that the film has an odd perspective shift. Initially, one thinks it’ll focus on Odeh’s daughter and widow, especially as the pair search through old family photos and share tender memories. When the film moves toward its true crime angle, these personal aspects move to the periphery—making the documentary into a formulaic critique of anti-Arab stereotypes in pop culture and the violent rise of Zionism during the 1980s that’s continued into the present day.
While “Who Killed Alex Odeh?” is certainly an imperative subject, one whose reverberations still have meaning, that significance is so undercut by the rote filmmaking that flattens the human at its center.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/3bqeM5w
.png)
