--- description: Was Fahrenheit 9/11 a fluke? Michael Moores anti-Bush documentary earned $119 million at the U.S. box office in 2004, and helped unseat a Presi oh,... title: A Feast of Documentaries image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # A Feast of Documentaries by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) May 5, 2006 4:00 AM CUT by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) May 5, 2006 4:00 AM CUT Was _Fahrenheit 9/11_ a fluke? Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary earned $119 million at the U.S. box office in 2004, and helped unseat a Presi… oh, sorry, George W. Bush still won. But it entertained, enlightened and annoyed many people, sometimes the same people, and hinted that the documentary form, so long ghettoized in art houses and on PBS, might be ready to flourish among mass audiences. Well, with one exception so odd it can be dismissed (the $79 million take for _March of the Penguins_), that didn’t happen. Last summer’s highly touted docs, from _Murderball_ to _Rize_, _Grizzly Man_ to _The Aristocrats_, raised hardly a murmur among mallrats and their families. You can count on the fingers of a maimed hand the docs that have grossed more than $15 million. Nonfiction films — including the couple dozen that have been playing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival here in New York City (the documentary portion of which is being sponsored by TIME Magazine) — look destined to appeal to a small crowd, a niche crowd. A liberal crowd, I hear you say. Or, as they have been called lately, the lonely crowd. Yes, most of these films, if they have a political slant, tilt left. Except for a few errant jabs at _Fahrenheit 9/11,_ there are virtually no right-wing docs. If there’s a sympathetic take on the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, or a study of Third World sweatshops (sorry, entrepreneurial empowerment sites) from the owner’s viewpoint, I haven’t seen it. That leaves the form open to cries from conservatives that docs are liberal soap operas, fables for the smug, gripes from the people out of power about those who wield it. I wouldn’t dispute that, even though I’m a knee-jerk liberal and proud of it. Indeed, I wouldn’t mind seeing a few docs that challenge my political complacencies rather than appealing to them. Somebody might even make a film about a born-again preacher who isn’t venal or nuts. But politics aside for just a moment, non-fiction films have a nobler mission than electing John Kerry, or reinforcing liberals’ assurance that they dwell on the moral high ground. They remind us, Left or Right, that there’s a world beyond the one we so cozily occupy — that people in remote countries, who seem so different if we give them a thought, have lessons to teach us. They put a human face on a social issue, to indicate why we should be invested in public policy — because, directly or indirectly, it affects you and me. At the heart of most documentaries is this salient message: The Other Is Us. This week, after watching more than a dozen docs showing at the Tribeca Film Festival, I realized that many of them possess more entertainment value than the Hollywood films I review for a living. They contain more intelligence, more surprises, a better chance for making me laugh (at the wit and foibles of the protagonists) or mist and moist up. Some of these films will get to a theater near you, if you live near an art house, or onto public and cable TV stations. From the notes that follow, you decide which ones are worth tracking down. **Committed Celebrities** On _Saturday Night Live_ in 1977, writer-performer Al Franken — or, in the comic self-promotional character he played called “Me, Al Franken” — announced that he might run for President. In 2008, he will most likely run for U.S. Senator from his home state of Minnesota. As he says of his presumed opponent, Norm Coleman, “I’d be the only New York Jew in the race who is actually from Minnesota.” For now, Franken writes best-selling Right-baiting books and hosts a daily three-hour show on Air America Radio, a perch from which he inveighs against the White House and Congress and promotes virtually any Democrat running for virtually anything. _Al Franken: God Spoke_, by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, is most interesting in revealing the similarities between standup comedy and campaigning: in both venues, the speaker needs to charm his listeners and stir them to applause (the manual version of voting). Franken is a serious guy with irresistible comic impulses. The tummler in him can’t understand why a top politico would advise him not to tell his favorite joke — one by Buddy Hackett, about a penis growing out of a man’s forehead — on the campaign trail. Yet he is often feisty when he’s supposed to be bantering, as when he crosses words with leggy super-mutilator Ann Coulter, or Bill O’Reilly, belligerent host of _The O’Reilly Factor_ on Fox News. Franken’s radio show was originally called _The O’Franken Factor,_ with the simple aim of annoying O’Reilly and provoking a lawsuit from him. It’s a pleasant irony that, for all his importance in lowering the level of TV’s political discourse to barrier reef depths, O’Reilly’s lasting legacy may be that he diverted the careers of two men: one (Al Franken) who could become a U.S. Senator, and another (Stephen Colbert) whose parody of The Factor has earned him a huge fan base and, after his fearless speech of the White House Press Corps dinner, the smoldering silence of the Washington elite. The movie is a record of two years in Franken’s life, from the publication of _Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right_ through the aftermath of the 2004 election. In its concentration on the Air America stint, the film inevitably covers much the same material as last year’s _Left of the Dial_. But it’s a frank-seeming portrait of a man who can always attract a crowd of autograph seekers, even at the Republican National Convention of 2004\. (Franken takes it in stride, noting, “In this country, celebrity trumps ideology.”) He is a kind of crucial figure, for he straddles a span that continues to shrink: the space between politicians who want to be more TV-friendly and comedians who have, in the absence of any charisma among elected Democrats, become the spokesmen for the American Left. The U.S. isn’t the only country where that chasm is becoming a nexus. In Italy, Sabina Guzzanti is a self-described buffoon (it has a slightly loftier connotation in Italian) and TV personality. In 2003 she launched a weekly show of political satire called _RaiOt_ — for the network that carried it, RAI Tre, and the English word Riot. The comedy she perpetrated was unexceptional: getting made up as Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s head of state, and telling jokes about him. But the show was cancelled after one airing, possibly because Berlusconi, a major industrialist, also owns RAI. “One man controls the government, the media and business,” says a commentator on a French program similar to _RaiOt_. “Can you talk about it nor not? According to Berlusconi, you can’t.” So she made a documentary, _Viva Zapatero!_. (The title exalts “And down with Berlusconi!”) In this brisk blast of agitprop, Guzzanti, a handsome, passionate defender of her right to say what she wants, summarizes her case, quotes from attacks on her (“Madwoman”; “Tale Your Money and Shut Up”) in Berlusconi-owned newspapers and ambushes politicians from Center-Left and Center-Right, who either supported Berlusconi or wouldn’t fight him. (Her father, one of her victims reminds her, is a Center-Right official. She replies, “I’m a grownup. I don’t have to ask permission.”) Guzzanti doesn’t speak with Jon Stewart, whose _The Daily Show_ has made political satire and burlesque a nightly addiction for a million and a half Americans. But she does show excerpts from satirical series nearer home, including Rory Bremner’s _Between Iraq and a Hard Place_ and the French puppet show _Les Guignols de l’Info,_ in which effigies of Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Berlusconi and other European leaders sing a mockery of “We Are the World” (in English): “We f— the world, / We f— the children, / We f— the world, the forest and the sea / So let us do it.” Maybe even the Comedy Central censors would shiver at that. _Viva Zapatero!_, which won a 15-20 min. ovation at last year’s Venice Film Festival, was Guzzanti’s immediate revenge on Berlusconi. Her ultimate revenge came this week, when the mogul-politico finally acknowledged the defeat he suffered in last month’s election. **Tragic Towns** They flit across our TV screens, these appalling images of devastation. We choke up a bit, perhaps send a donation to an appropriate charity, then go back to our lives. Because New Orleans is in America, and because it became a political embarrassment as well as a human disaster, Katrina got more sustained attention. But what of other natural catastrophes, like the tsunami in Indonesia? Or the Iranian city of Bam, which, on Dec. 26, 2003 — exactly a year before the Indonesian tsunami — was leveled by an earthquake. Of the 100,000 inhabitants, 30,000 died. The rest were left to flee, or live in rubble. In the poignant _Voices of Bam_, Dutch filmmakers Mariana Van Der Horst and Maasja Ooms patrol the devastated town and tiptoe into the minds of those who remain; the survivors speak, in poetic voiceover, of the family, the wives and lovers who live only in their memories, haunt their days and dreams. A preventable tragedy occurred 28 years ago, in Jonestown, Guyana. Some 900 members of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — souls cleansed, brains washed — took poison and died at his command. Stanley Nelson’s documentary _Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple_ interviews survivors and kin of the dead, and has a trove of footage to illuminate, if not explain, the seductive, destructive power of the Temple prophet. About Jim Jones, a childhood friend recalled, “There was something not quite right. He was obsessed with religion. He was obsessed with death.” But he always had the spellbinder’s gift of bending people to his will, which meshed strangely with his seemingly progressive, inclusive social agenda. Paraphrasing Tom Joad in _The Grapes of Wrath_, Jones proclaimed, “Wherever there are people struggling for justice and righteousness, there am I.” One of his early churches, in Indianapolis in 1953, was fully interracial when that wasn’t cool. Moving to California, he established the People’s Temple, which grew from 81 members in 1966 to thousands a few years later. Predominantly but not overwhelmingly black, Jones’ faithful didn’t simply join his church; they became its complete dependents and indentured slaves. They received medical and dental care (when Jones or his board approved it) while they turned their paychecks over to the Temple, receiving a weekly allowance of $5\. Jones stoked and coveted their devotion: “if you want me as your God, I’ll be your God.” His charisma did not go unnoticed by political potentates, in California (Jerry and Willie Brown sang his praises) and Washington (Walter Mondale and Rosalyn Carter appeared with him). For a time, he was head of San Francisco’s Housing Authority. But the whispers about his predatory sexual appetite (which devoured parishioners of both sexes) and his reluctance to let disaffected members leave the fold caught the attention of the authorities. Jones moved the Temple to the Guyanan jungle, out of which his flock built an impressive village, Jonestown, housing thousands of Temple worshipers and their families. In a newsreel clip, Jones shows off the stocks of food he has amassed: meats, vegetables, Kool Aid… It all came down in November.1978, when Congressman Leo Ryan and his staff visited the Temple. After a day’s investigation of Jonestown, Ryan announced that he found many people “who thought this was the best thing that had ever happened to them.” Before he was to leave the next morning, several members slipped notes to Ryan, saying they wanted to leave but were forbidden to. He agreed to take a few of the disaffected with him — and was shot dead as he attempted to board the plane. That afternoon, Jones poured out nearly a thousand cups of Kool Aid laced with cyanide and, in an excruciating parody of the Eucharist, told the faithful to take and drink. They were committing, he said, “an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” In the detritus of the ensuing carnage, a note was “If nobody understands, it matters not, I am ready to die now. Darkness settle on Jonestown on its last day on earth.” **Heroes and Victims** Wars, laws, business decisions — all have consequences. Three strong films show little people who reeled from those large facts, got up and fought. One of these stories you may have read in yesterday’s New York _Times:_ about Jeremy Feldbusch, a wounded veteran of the Iraq invasion. He came to Iraq from Blairsville, Pa. — coal mining country. A wrestler from age 5 to 18, he got a B.S. in biology from the University of Pittsburgh. Soon after arriving in Iraq he was injured. “We were told by his doctors that the piece of shrapnel had gone under his goggles,” says Jeremy’s brother Shaun, “and basically played ping-pong in his head… and he had damage to both sides of his frontal lobe.” One tangible memorial to his injuries is a sign near his home: Blind Person Area. A more significant tribute is the work Feldbusch has done in raising awareness of the 19.000 U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq. _Home Front_, by Richard Haskin, who worked on _Capturing the Friedmans,_ was made in close collaboration with Jeremy’s family. One point viewers of docs often make about verite movies on ordinary folks is “I’d never let a film crew into the rhythms and crannies of my life.” The Feldbusches obviously put up with Haskin’s intrusion to get out the message that we all must care for our wounded. Our representatives sent them there; we need to nourish them when they return, in whatever shape. Jeremy’s folks seem an extraordinary loving family, every bit as ordinary and heroic as he, His mother, especially, is a warm mountain of caring. “It’s never going to be what it was,” she says. “But we Among America’s unlucky families were those whose kin ran afoul of New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, established in 1973, mandating that a person found possessing or selling a certain amount of marijuana, cocaine or heroin would receive a sentence of at least 15 years, not subject to a judge’s emendation. Forty-eight states now have these laws, whose enforcement stocks the nation’s prisons with hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders. _Lockdown USA,_ by _Michael Skolnik and Rebecca Chaiklin,_ follows the crusade of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and others to get Governor George Pataki and the state legislatures to change those laws. It’s a closeup lesson in political compromise — or, as many supporters of change see it, the humiliating status quo. “The Right, they’re calling it a jail break,” says Simmons, while the Left, “they want total repeal.” An hour into the film, Pataki and Simmons do cut a deal, but one that reduces the penalty from 15 to 9 years and still doesn’t allow judges to ameliorate the sentence. On stage, comedian-turned-activist Randy Predico notes sarcastically, “We got a major victory, all right. People who were facing 15 years to life are now all the way down to 14-1/2 years to life.” (Some comedians get to fudge the facts.) “So it was a major victory. And Russell Simmons can get all the credit for this.” The movie thinks a little too highly of Simmons’ star quality; it can’t pull itself away from his many conferences with politicos. Its most telling story thread is the tale of a convict-victim. Darryl Best says that he signed for a FedEx package, though it wasn’t addressed to him and he didn’t know what was inside. The package contained drugs, the cops were there, and he got 15 years to life. Eventually he is encouraged to petition Pataki for clemency. See the film to find out if justice or mercy was served. And stay till the end,to see a gallery of a few of the vast numbers still in lockdown. Example: “Matthew Jones: still serving 60 years for delivery of a narcotic.” Liberals, can you live with this? Conservatives, look for the money. New York State alone spends a half-billion dollars a year to house 15,500 drug offenders, most of whom had no history of violence. Is this how you want you tax dollars spent? Our tax dollars also support the industries that have outsourced American jobs. In Tijuana, which bills itself as “World Capital of the Television,” companies like Sony, Sanyo and Panasonic opened factories whose employees assemble TV-set parts. In 1999, 4,000 factories employed a million workers. From all over Mexico and countries farther south, people (mostly women) streamed into the city for the relatively high wages: $68 for a six-day week. The owner of one building leased to a manufacturer said that globalization was turning Mexico into “a nation of plantations.” These are the Grapes of NAFTA. _Maquilapolis_, by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, is in the spirit of recent documentaries on the plight of the female workers who staff garment factories in China. This film focuses on Carmen Duran, a Mexican employee of Sanyo. When, after 6-1/2 years in Tijuana, the company decamped for Indonesia, Duran and a few of her coworkers sued to win the severance pay the said was mandated by Mexican law. Another laborer, Lourdes Lujon, agitated against Metales y Derivados when that company skipped town and left a festering dump that gave those who lived nearby skin diseases and put them at risk for leukemia. The movie, mostly a straightforward synopsis of the workers’ grievances, argues not for special privileges but for a flicker of justice. It has one gust of cinematic artistry: scenes of the women, on a desolate mesa, performing hand-ballets of their factory tasks. It is reminiscent of Robert Flaherty’s great document of Depression-era farm workers, _The Land_ (1941), where we watch a sleeping boy whose hands move automatically and involuntarily. “He’s shucking peas,” his mother explains. Do the workers win their cases? I won’t say. But the conflicts of work and poverty, hope and exploitation, dignity and despair play out around the world, as people whose lives rarely touch ours toil to make our computers and sneakers. A decade ago, a documentary similar to _Maquilapolis_ could have been made in any Rust Belt city about the workers whose jobs literally went south, to be filled at much lower wages by people like Carmen and Lourdes. A decade from now, another might be made in Indonesia, if businesses can find poorer countries and hungrier workers. **Portraits of the Angry Artist** A film festival would be incomplete without studies of filmmakers. The TFF had at least three: of Roberto Rossellini and his part-time muse Ingrid Bergman, and of two auteurs who were so “indie” they were nearly isolated: Robert Frank and Jack Smith. I skipped the Rossellini movie, though it was made by the wonderful Canadian zany Guy Maddin, because I heard that some members of the Rossellini family were outraged by it, and I was not in a mood to take sides between two groups I respect. In _Robert Frank: Leaving Home Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank_, director Gerald Fox manages to pry open the can of steely reserve the director-photographer normally encases himself in, and in the process opens up not only Frank (who will be 82 in November) but his work. It deserves to be explored by a wider audience, whether for the landmark book of pictures _The Americans_ or Frank’s beyond-warts film of the Rolling Stones, the 1972 _Cocksucker Blues_. Back when Frank made that documentary, one word in its title (not Blues) was verboten in the American media. But at least it was allowed to be shown, sporadically. Jack Smith had worse luck. In 1964, the year Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity after a New York stage appearance, Smith’s pansexual phantasmagoria _Flaming Creatures_ was busted by the NYPD. It was eventually banned in 22 states and four countries; as late as 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General was impounding prints of the movie. Documentaries need self-dramatizers, and being a diva was Jack Smith’s art and life. At the start of Mary Jordan’s irresistible doc _Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis_, the artist’s reedy voice is heard intoning, “Doctor, doctor, tell me, please, / Is my brain a germ or a disease?” Late in life, he says of his work: “I was knocking myself out to make this stuff. And I always assumed that people would see this and have pity and give me a little support. \[Now he shouts:\] They didn’t!” Smith was inspired as a kid by the Scheherezade schlock of B-movie queen Maria Montez. As a director, he renamed one of his drag stars Mario Montez and starred him in no-budget avant-garde movies of delirious (and now endearing) Caligulan excess. Both Mario and Jack went to work for Andy Warhol, who called Smith “the only person I would ever copy. He’s just so terrific, and I think he makes the best movies.” Warhol’s Factory and the films that emerged from it — _Chelsea Girls_ and the rest — might not have existed without Smith’s influence. Consider that a curse or a blessing. With Mephistophelean good looks swathed in leopard-skin couture, Smith was a ready-made icon of the Underground, and an easy magnet for police and politicians. “Moral decay is spreading through our country and our society,” declaimed one bluenose, brandishing a poster for _Flaming Creatures_ — thus giving priceless free publicity to the film he meant to denounce. What was the big deal? Languid displays of male and female genitals. As one of Smith’s avatars, John Waters, says: “Seeing a limp penis — in an arty way, in a way that was intellectual — was revolutionary. The police came because of it! Imagine, calling the cops because you saw a dick in a movie.” The furor made Smith notorious but not famous. Within a few years of the _Flaming Creatures_ fracas, new and more lurid displays of artistic obscenity were on display without police interruption. Smith kept at his mission for another quarter century, but audiences didn’t always come. Yet he soldiered on — even, one night, when no paying customers showed up for one of his live performances. He did it anyway, all seven hours. Avant-garde art is hard; dying is easy. In 1991, languishing with a fatal bout of AIDS in a Manhattan hospital, the lifelong kvetch was suddenly buoyant. The longtime starving artist told playwright Ron Tavel, “It’s the best food I’ve had in my life.” His mind has sustenance too: dreams of his eternal movie goddess, Maria (not Mario) Montez. It would be lovely if lots of people saw this documentary about an avant-gardist who loved old Hollywood movies. It might remind them that there are lands beyond today’s blockbusters and timid dramas that are worth visiting and, for an hour and a half, living in. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907896/a-feast-of-documentaries/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907896/a-feast-of-documentaries/"},"headline":"A Feast of Documentaries","datePublished":"2006-05-05T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:12:23.264Z","description":"Was Fahrenheit 9/11 a fluke? 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