Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer

The problem, of course, with a new documentary about the venerable German filmmaker Werner Herzog is that there are already two perfectly fine ones out there, strong and idiosyncratic and worthy of the ecstatic chaos of the man’s life and art: Les Blank’s 1982 Burden of Dreams, about the turbulent making of Herzog’s most backbreaking effort Fitzcarraldo, and Herzog’s own 1999 My Best Fiend, about his fraught relationship with his five-time leading man Klaus Kinski. The new one, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, is more of an appreciation. 

Which is fine: the man is 81 now, his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All was just published in English a few weeks ago, and with his appearances in such mainstream things as Jack Reacher, The Mandalorian and The Simpsons, he’s more a pop-culture icon than ever. People laugh affectionately at his accent; they can’t get enough of news stories about him being shot by “not a significant bullet” during an on-camera interview (seen here). Christian Bale, one of several collaborators interviewed here, muses that Herzog welcomes a certain amount of wildness into his life, and it finds him and also inspires him.

Directed by Thomas von Steinaecker, Radical Dreamer knows its handsome-enough but run-of-the-mill talking-heads footage can’t compare with Herzog’s own spectacular and bizarre imagery (clips are shown throughout), so it doesn’t try to. Walking around his childhood haunts in Munich, Herzog declines to enter the house where he grew up, and late in the film he revisits a waterfall from his youth and says he doesn’t want to know where the water comes from. Herzog would probably rather explore his past with his own camera (or in his memoirs) than for someone else’s. 

For those who’ve seen even a little of Herzog’s prodigious output — and not just the relatively recent, famous films like Grizzly Man or Encounters at the End of the World (with its notorious footage of the penguin marching to its solitary doom) — Radical Dreamer can’t help but be Herzog 101, the film equivalent of one of those Very Short Introduction books. But he’s terrific company, somewhat though not completely mellowed from the nihilist we saw in Burden of Dreams with his meme-ready excoriations of indifferent nature (“The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain”). He seems to have accepted his status as a battle-hardened veteran of moviemaking (he calls himself “a good soldier of cinema”) who can offer practical advice to new generations of mythmakers. That his third-act fame has centered more on his personality and his strolling through major franchises like Star Wars (hey, Herzog’s gotta eat) than on his filmmaking is not, I gather, an irony he appreciates. Thus does pop culture sausage-ize even so prickly and questing an artist as Herzog.

The most interesting aspect of the film, to me, is the spotlight given to two of Herzog’s contemporaries in the New German Cinema of the ‘60s, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff (another major one, Fassbinder, burned out in 1982). Herzog is therefore placed within a certain artistic/social context, but even that couldn’t contain him. So he has dabbled in literature, theater and opera as well as film. But the keeper quote is Herzog remembering being told — by no less a figure than Fritz Lang, via Herzog’s mentor Lotte Eisner — that he and his fellows were making post-fascist cinema, or “after the Nazis” films. (Herzog and his confreres were born near the end of, or soon after, Nazi Germany.) The flowering of creativity after a dictatorship, like the feeling of fresh air and freedom following the end of an abusive relationship, is a phenomenon Pedro Almodóvar has spoken of in Spain post-Franco. Herzog and his peers pointed to a possible future for German life and art beyond atrocity and guilt over same. If there are any Herzogs among the Ukrainians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, or in American classrooms, I hope for all our sakes they survive the gunfire.

Once Within a Time

By the time Mike Tyson turns up as “the Mentor” in Once Within a Time, the phantasmagoric new strangeness by Godfrey Reggio, you might want to know exactly how Reggio directed Tyson — what he told Tyson about the character he was playing and the gestures and expressions he was making. Reggio, most famous for his Qatsi trilogy begun by Koyaanisqatsi in 1982, has said that Tyson didn’t actually need much direction. He, at least, understood what he was doing there, though we might not. 

But I’m not here to poke fun. Once Within a Time is the latest (perhaps the last) in the 83-year-old former monk’s forty-year mission to make cautionary visual/aural tone poems about what humans are doing to a perfectly good planet. Greta Thunberg is represented as a paper mask, as of course she is. She and Mike Tyson might typify two different approaches to living, or maybe not. Tyson’s casting as a Mentor who instructs children how to build a new world on the ruins of the old might signify that Reggio believes that anyone — rapists of the earth, rapists of women — could conceivably redeem themselves and play useful roles in evolution.

But of course Once Within a Time can’t be held to a strict ecological reading, or any reading. I doubt Reggio (who co-directed with longtime editor Jon Kane) sits around watching other people’s films, but his movie, let’s say, resonates with the work of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Shinya Tsukamoto, and more. You could groove on the sounds (Philip Glass, who goes all the way back to Koyaanisqatsi with Reggio, contributes another noodly-doodly score) and images, let it all wash over you, and not bother with a scene-by-scene assessment of meaning at all. Perhaps Reggio might prefer it that way. If it means nothing to you, it means nothing (and you’ve only spent less than an hour on it). If it speaks to you, either bluntly or slant, it might do its most enduring work as an allusive experimental fable.

I don’t feel like writing a blow-by-blow of what “happens,” and you don’t feel like reading one, trust me. Some of it, fixated on children or primates gazing at the camera, has ties to Reggio’s previous effort, 2013’s Visitors. A credit near the end tells us the film was “handmade in Brooklyn,” and it does have that quality of having been tinkered with, either digitally or in real space. There’s no dialogue — not in recognizable English, anyway. Various figures — Iranian composer Sussan Deyhim as “Mother Muse,” a “Nonsense Man” who looks like an apple, spirits and robots — do their duty-dance with the death of the world. Smartphones appear as diabolical screens reflecting false existence back to us, at one point forming a black-brick road followed by an Adam and Eve.

Some critics don’t like what they read as Reggio’s preaching and hypocrisy (using the same technology he demonizes, etc.) He certainly isn’t in it for the money, and his brand of film assembly has, for the last twenty years or so, needed Steven Soderbergh in its corner as an executive producer or “presenter.” (Reggio has always enjoyed benefactors: Francis Coppola presented Koyaanisqatsi, and he and George Lucas shepherded Powaqqatsi.) Once Within a Time seems aimed at kids, and a good deal of it has a joyful, searching quality. This time out, Reggio seems to acknowledge that the end of life as we know it doesn’t have to mean the end of life full stop, that there might be a next chapter only the youngest of us might read. Or it might be all devastation and charred flowers. We don’t know, and neither does Reggio, who seems to shape these things more as questions than as answers anyway. 

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023)

The late William Friedkin was revered for his hard-punching, action-centered approach to moviemaking. He was never averse to manipulation or what some might consider cheap tactics to get an audience worked up (or worked over). His two most famous films are exemplars of their genres — The French Connection a game-changing cop thriller, The Exorcist the same for horror movies — and in those genres, a certain high-pressure style can only help. But a corner of Friedkin also loved courtroom dramas. He remade 12 Angry Men; he made Rampage one-third serial-killer horror and two-thirds legal procedural asking whether the captured killer could duck the death penalty by being declared insane; and he logged a similar ratio in his war drama Rules of Engagement.

What turned out to be Friedkin’s swan song is one of the most noted courtroom meditations, Herman Wouk’s play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, based on Wouk’s novel. (The material also spawned the famous Humphrey Bogart vehicle in 1954, and Robert Altman directed a film of the play in 1988.) I’ll avoid spoilers for those new to the story, but Friedkin, as writer as well as director, has made some changes, updating the action from post-WWII to 2022, and one effect of the alterations is that Greenwald (Jason Clarke), the Jewish lawyer who defends Lt. Maryk (Jake Lacy) against the charge of mutiny against Commander Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), no longer has a wrenchingly personal reason to make the climactic speech he still makes. So Greenwald’s anger seems undercooked.

Still, Friedkin captains this old ship smoothly, never resorting to flash (or flashbacks) and holding to an old-school talking-heads style that comes to seem, in this era of computer-generated whiz-bang, deeply satisfying in its meat-and-potatoes clarity. The emphasis is squarely on the talking heads, what they’re saying and, more importantly, what they’re not. Queeg was a taskmaster with a possible nervous condition, decreasingly liked by his crew, but does that mean Maryk was justified in flouting Queeg’s orders during a ship-threatening typhoon, steering the Caine in the opposite direction from the one Queeg specified? 

The more contemporary framing does enable Friedkin to cast away from the usual white-male default in this production; Monica Raymund files a fearsome, no-nonsense prosecutor Challee, while the late Lance Reddick (in his swan song; the movie is dedicated to him) brings every drop of quiet but iron authority he can muster as head judge Blakely. Kiefer Sutherland’s Queeg is in the long-standing tradition of glowering, tight-voiced Queegs, fondling his marbles and speaking in defense of rigid adherence to protocol. Would Queeg’s marbles be a fidget-spinner in 2022? Is Queeg on the spectrum? Friedkin updates the milieu without particularly refreshing the play’s attitudes towards mental disability. 

Friedkin had wanted to direct The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for years. Whether he would’ve wanted it to be his coda is impossible to know, and I would guess he landed on this as his first feature in 12 years because the money was there to make it. Is it a weak film to go out on? Not at all. The editing, as always with Friedkin, is as sharp as a fresh razor and takes us through the drama briskly and firmly. The medium close-ups of tormented faces dominate the proceedings, and Friedkin stays on those faces, knowing each one is its own mini-movie of fear and regret. I’m glad he was able to make it, and I’m sorry there won’t be more.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

The writer-director Wes Anderson loves storybooks, and he loves theater. He has combined the two forms into his own distinct, deadpan-symmetrical mode of cinema since the beginning. The latest example is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar along with three other short films which, like Henry Sugar, are based on short stories by Roald Dahl: The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison, all now streaming on Netflix. (I imagine Criterion will put out a Blu-ray eventually.) 

Henry Sugar, at 39 minutes the longest of the quartet, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous non-hero, who teaches himself the art of “seeing without eyes” so that he can make a killing at the casinos. Like a lot of Anderson films (including Asteroid City from earlier this year), Henry Sugar unfolds within and without multiple levels of presentation. Old Roald himself (Ralph Fiennes), who shows up in the other segments as well, tells the tale, as do a doctor (Dev Patel) and Henry himself. Sets are pulled aside or uncouple to reveal other sets, and the characters (including Ben Kingsley as the guru who imparts the seeing-without-eyes procedure) mainly face us straight on and narrate.

The Swan (17 minutes) takes on the favored Dahl theme of children behaving terribly to other children. A bullied boy is tied to tracks, threatened with a rifle, and finally made to climb a tree to take the place of a swan one of the bullies killed. Rupert Friend plays the bullied boy as an adult and narrates. Friend also appears in The Rat Catcher (17 minutes), about the time an expert “rat man” (Fiennes) was called to deal with an infestation in a hayrick. Lastly, Poison (17 minutes) considers a man (Cumberbatch) immobilized by a deadly snake slumbering on his stomach, and the doctor (Kingsley) who comes to solve the problem.

Henry Sugar seems to exist on its own pretty well (it was shown by itself at the Venice Film Festival), and the other three share certain motifs: animals, the tension of having to stay absolutely still. It appears that Henry Sugar kicks things off by leaving us with the notion that someone with the power to help others should use that power. The next one, The Swan (I’m going by the order that Netflix lined them up for me to watch), imagines a world where help is not coming, but the afflicted character, says Dahl, never gives up. Then the next two segments offer help when invading animals crowd into the manicured boxes of life in a Wes Anderson film. Ending on Poison (which has been adapted at least twice before, once on Alfred Hitchcock Presents by the Master himself) seems to indicate that it’s important to help even if help may be neither required nor appreciated.

Despite the occasional tension, the filmmaking is becalmed, almost sedate, and assured. Sometimes this sort of Anderson project feels like a challenge he’s issuing to himself: how flat-affect and intentionally artificial can we make this story and still please an audience? And, like so much else he’s made, this series of shorts isn’t going to move the needle for Anderson haters any more than Asteroid City or The French Dispatch did. But those who eagerly await the newest American Empirical Picture will be entranced, as usual, by the toybox sets and the people standing stock still like toy figures inside immaculate compositions (all but Poison, which is shot in widescreen format, are presented in the square Academy ratio). Henry Sugar offers a more nuanced portrait of a man capable of positive change, while the other three have one emotion in common: fear. Are shadows of doubt creeping into Wes Anderson’s well-trimmed matryoshkas of narrative? As he gets closer to his end than to his beginning, his puppet reveries may darken in interesting ways.