Doc Watch

THE OVERNIGHTERS (A-minus) - This churning snapshot of a wayward ministry should be added to our list of top documentaries of 2014. It is a riveting morality tale and a minor tragedy.

Pastor Jay Reinke is on a mission in Williston, North Dakota -- with the explosion of men drawn to the booming oil fields (and the rise of fracking), many of them have checkered pasts and arrive without a place to stay. Reinke turns his church and its parking lot into a dormitory. Neighbors, parishioners and his board of directors keep their distance, and from the start Reinke can count on little support. Even his wife and kids seem to go through the motions of making the project a success. Reinke presses on through sheer force of will bordering on obsession

Williston -- the one town that survived the Great Recession unscathed -- attracts both honest laborers and ne'er-do-wells as if it were California in 1849. Men from all corners leave families behind to descend on Williston in search of a paycheck that could easily crack six figures. Reinke helps them polish their employment skills while infusing them with the holy spirit.

However, the town doesn't have the patience for the rehabilitation process, and it treats the influx of laborers like a rat infestation. The city council starts cracking down on perceived zoning infractions. And when Reinke goes a step too far in harboring a sex offender, the local newspaper starts sniffing around (tipped off by a disgruntled Overnighter).

Suddenly the pastor's world starts to unravel. A huge reveal in the final 20 minutes is not hard to predict, but it packs a wallop nonetheless. A wrenching scene between Reinke and Alan Mezo, an ex-con who rose to the job of right-hand man while struggling to maintain his sobriety, is drenched in subtext.

Writer/director Jesse Moss doesn't make a misstep in 102 minutes. Moss was a producer on a documentary about civil-rights lawyer William Kunstler and directed "Full Battle Rattle" in 2008 about the Army's Iraq simulation in the Mojave Desert. Here he is confident and in command of his subject. You can tell from the start that not everything is kosher with Pastor Reinke; Moss hangs on for a rough ride. But he doesn't forget to pause to record the humanity of many of the troubled men Reinke sought to save while all those around him sought to drive them away. 

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (2012) (B+) - A middle-aged documentarian, appalled and amazed by his slacker video-obsessed teen son, reconnects with his old mojo and retraces his own youthful journeys.

Give this 20 minutes. If you're hooked, you're hooked; otherwise, you might be bored by one man's struggles with fatherhood and the slog of aging. Ross McElwee is about 60 and feeling perplexed about son Adrian's general moodiness punctuated with bursts of creativity. Archival footage of Adrian as an innocent boy clashes with new images of a young man searching for an identity, mostly by staring at a screen.

This pushes Ross into such a reverie that he returns to the small French town that he lived in during a college dropout year. He looks for the photographer he worked for, the French woman he dated. But more poignantly he is searching for himself, both the 20-year-old who journaled feverishly and the older man reconciling his life choices.

McElwee has chops as a storyteller, and it's to his credit that he doesn't wallow in nostalgia or disappear into his own navel. He uses callbacks effectively, and he curates his old photos and edits this film with precision. Thankfully, Adrian and his Go-Pro are sidelined for most of the second half of the film.

McElwee has a weak voice -- he sounds like George Will with a cold -- which can be a distraction. But it's also cute to hear him valiantly butcher the French language throughout. His hosts in St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany tolerate it sweetly. 

BONUS TRACK
The closing song in "The Overnighters," from Steve Earle, "Lonely Are the Free":