A friend of a friend recently visited an uncle who’d just come back from fighting in Iraq. He conceded that the invasion hadn’t reduced the threat of terrorism or uncovered any weapons of mass destruction or exposed any links between September 11 and Saddam Hussein. “Just the same,” he said, “September 11 happened almost two years ago–and somebody’s got to pay.”
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The notion that “somebody’s got to pay” is arguably an aesthetic principle rather than an ethical one–the kind of expectation bred by the dramaturgy of dumb action movies with revenge plots as well as certain sports events, all of which promote a knee-jerk idea of tit for tat. In contrast, some of the other best new films I saw in Toronto–Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold, Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass, and Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night, the first two of which are showing at the Chicago festival–take a stab at explaining a real-life crime before implicitly concluding that it can never be explained definitively. Bellocchio may come the closest as he probes the motives of Italy’s Red Brigade in kidnapping and killing Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978. Panahi, working with a script by Abbas Kiarostami, offers a potent look at the class resentment of a middle-aged pizza deliveryman in Tehran who killed a jewelry-store owner and then himself in the course of an attempted robbery, but it’s entirely to the film’s credit that it doesn’t suggest that the man’s resentment explains everything. It’s equally to the credit of Billy Ray’s docudrama about the concocted journalism of New Republic reporter Stephen Glass that it’s interested less in Glass’s motives than in the motives of the colleagues who believed his many fabrications.
Ever since the evening news became a display of bootlicking interspersed with press releases, documentaries in movie theaters have been a lot more popular. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine–perhaps the principal source of American reviewers’ ire at Cannes last year–has already brought in well over $50 million, making it by far the most commercially successful documentary in the history of movies, though it’s hardly the only one that’s been doing well lately. This doesn’t mean that Moore’s any less of a manipulator than Steven Spielberg, but it does suggest that audiences no longer see the official pieties that dominate TV as adequate. Go Further is the only one of the dozen features showing in the Chicago festival’s documentary competition that I’ve seen, though I’ve heard praise for a couple of the others, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.
