GENERATION WEALTH

Here's a funny story.  Well not really.  A while ago the documentarian Lauren Greenfield made a short doc called KIDS+MONEY and I reviewed it on this site. The post got insane numbers of hits. Disproportionate to any other post. And when I looked at the stats of how people were coming to that post, let's just say they were evil evil people. I took the post down.  Her doc had nothing to do with what they were looking for, but it was disturbing in its own way. Because it showed just how far young kids were becoming materialistic and money obsessed - superficial and blighted by a hunger for wealth that could never be satiated.

A while later I reviewed Lauren Greenfield's 2012 doc THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES. The subject was the same - about the insidious corruption of greed. But in this case it focussed on a rich couple building a gargantuan mansion in Florida on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis.  I can never remember the wife getting into her limo and taking her kids to a McDonald's drive-thru.  Because they should grow up in a massive mansion but with no actual care or attention.

So now we come to her next feature length doc - GENERATION WEALTH - which continues and expands upon these themes. Following up on interview subjects she met when teens in Hollywood and trying to examine the impact that extreme wealth has on kids' sense of self and morality.  She puts herself in that same cohort - she is after a private school kid, layering on her training as an anthropologist, in order to make sense of her childhood.  With shocking vulnerability, she admits to feeling sensitive about not being able to afford fancy clothes, or being dropped a block away from home because she was ashamed of it.  

I've seen some interviewers object to this personalisation but I found it really fascinating both of itself here and as context for her career.  I found the scattershot organisation of the film far more frustrating.  It's as though the film is a series of individually quite interesting ten minute segments, but all thrown in the air and assembled in no particular order.  I felt very strongly having watched this that it needed a lot more context from expert talking heads explaining the phenomena rather than just showing lots of different superficial people. We just needed a few social anthropologists and critical theories to talk more about the influence of TV and social media, and political and financial analysis. And I mean actual financial analysis rather than from some German monetarist on the run.

GENERATION WEALTH has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R. It played Sundance and SXSW 2018 and was released in the USA and UK this July in cinemas and on streaming services. In the UK you can watch it on Sky and Curzon Home Cinema, for example. 

London Film Fest 2010 Day 5 - TABLOID

After the sombre political critiques of STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE and THE FOG OF WAR, Errol Morris lightens up with his hilarious documentary about "Joyce McKinney and The Manacled Mormon". This was apparently a fantastically famous tabloid story in the late 1970s, and Errol Morris brings it back to life with interviews with McKinney and the key tabloid journo who blew it up.

As she tells it, Joyce McKinney was a pretty young blonde girl and former beauty queen who fell in love with a young clean-cut Mormon kid called Kirk Anderson. His parents weren't too keen on him marrying some floozy from outside of the faith, but Joyce was smitten. So, when Kirk was sent to the UK on a preaching mission, Joyce did what seemed rational in her narcissistic head - hire a pilot and a former body-builder slash body-guard - fly to England and kidnap her beloved! Now, all of these seems completely half-baked, but bear in mind that McKinney has an IQ of 168! That puts you in the top 0.001% of people in the world! Anyways, back to the story. McKinney takes Kirk to a cute little countryside B&B and basically tries to fuck him out of his religious hang-ups. As she tells it it's a romantic little quasi-honeymoon. As the press tell it, it's a female rape of an innocent man. But the truth is probably as follows: Kirk did like Joyce and did have sex with her - willingly - but when he left her to go to London felt so guilty about it, given his religious beliefs, that is was easier to consciously or sub-consciously go along with the narrative that he was forced into it. Joyce comes across as well-meaning, but deeply unboundaried, and basically in love with the Idea of being in an Against All Odds Romeo and Juliet style love affair. The story then moves to the aftermath of the tryst in the cottage. Joyce is hunted down by the police, banged up, put on trial and convicted, but skips town in a ludicrously Scooby Doo disguise with 13 suitcases of press clippings. And then, proving F Scott Fitzgerald wrong, her life has a second act almost as absurd as the first, and certainly one you'll enjoy finding out about as you watch the film.

TABLOID fizzes off the screen - it's fun, loud, colourful, and great entertainment. Morris uses animation, sound effects, and press clips to great effect.  He is laughing with and at McKinney's delusions. I'm not sure I got any deep insight into how the press puffs up a story, or about the Mormon church, but Joyce McKinney - clever, delusional, ruthlessly good at PR - is fascinating enough, and prefigures the celebrity culture we live with today. And Errol Morris' technique, which is not to appear on screen asking questions, or to use voice-over, but simply to let the camera roll and the "victim" expose themselves, has never found a more willing or entertaining subject. Ultimately, though, this documentary is as bubble-gum-tastic as Joyce herself - fun while you watch it, but disposable.

TABLOID played Toronto and Telluride 2010. It will be released in the USA on July 15th.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE - brutal, brilliant documentary

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE is a documentary about the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal. It is directed by Errol Morris - the film-maker who brought us a stunningly candid interview with former US Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara. Morris' documentary, THE FOG OF WAR, allowed McNamara to walk us through his decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam. It transformed my rather thin understanding of the period, and my prejudice against McNamara, into empathy and sympathy. Part of the reason why THE FOG OF WAR was such a good documentary was that Morris allowed his documentary subject the room to feel comfortable and be himself. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the high-concept documentaries of Michael Moore, Morris' doesn't loom large over his films. The subject is centre stage and the documentarian is as neutral as possible.

Those sterling qualities are what make STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE a tremendous film. Morris goes straight to the people at the heart of the biggest moral quandries of our time and gives them a comfortable environment in which to explain themselves. There's no hectoring, no crude politics - people are left to damn themselves with their own excuses or gain our sympathy in turn. The subject matter is also similar to THE FOG OF WAR. McNamara is a poster-boy for liberal hate for his involvement in Vietnam. Lynndie England, Charles Graner, Sabrina Harman, Ivan Frederick, Megan Ambuhl et al are even more notorious as the cocky, smiling sadists, posing with Iraqi prisoners in humiliating sexual positions for their own kicks.

Morris interviews many of the key participants, though not Charles Graner, who seems to have been the ringleader, because he's still in jail. Morris wants to get behind the infamous photographs. Photos don't lie, but they are simply a snapshot. You don't see the before and after, the cajoling, the nervousness, the regret or the defiance. So he just turns the camera on the people involved and lets them calmly explain what was going on when the photographs were taken, inter-cutting this with the actual footage, re-enactments, and a subtle score from Danny Elfman.

Lynndie England feels very strongly that she was the victim of the cajoling of her domineering boyfriend. She makes excuses but doesn't seem particularly contrite. She regrets her life being ruined so young, but does she really recognise why people were so horrified? Doesn't seem so. Megan Ambuhl and Javal Davis make exuses too. Then again, they come across as more cogent. You get the feeling that they knew what they were doing wasn't morally correct but that they had reasoned that in "the fog of war" all gloves are off. Sabrina Harman, on the other hand, does seem to regret what happened. She seems to acknowledge that she crossed a line: that at some point, she knew she had done wrong and that she was going to be punished. The only person who I felt genuinely sorry for - apart from the Iraqis, of course, was Janis Karpinski - the commanding officer at the prison. She comes across as a woman of real integrity and honour who was treated very poorly by the hierarchy eager to be seen to react.

Watching STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE is a brutal experience because you are constantly exposed to gruesome footage of people being sadistic and then making excuses. You're seeing humanity at its worst. But what's even more shocking is that, in the final analysis, these US soldiers - some of them very young - some of them clearly under the impression that their behaviour was sanctioned - were hung out to dry. And, after all, aren't they partly right? The photograph shown above wasn't one for which they were prosecuted. No. This wasn't "prisoner abuse". This was Standard Operating Procedure. This was sanctioned. And if we've fallen to the point where this is allowed, who's to judge what isn't?

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE played Berlin 2008, where it was the first documentary to be nominated for the Golden Bear. It was released in the US, Germany and Belgium earlier this year. It opens this weekend in Australia and on July 18th in the UK.