04 June 2017

Obit noir


OBIT (A-minus) - This surprisingly tender, smartly crafted documentary goes behind the scenes of the obituary desk and the team of writers at the New York Times, with entertaining results.

Native New Yorker Vanessa Gould, in her first full-length film as director, shows a deft touch with the topics of death, journalism, the creative process and the arc of history. She is blessed with a few irresistible characters who carry the film. And she shows an appreciation for the inner workings of a newsroom and its various traditions, from coffee addictions to gallows humor.

And the morgue. That's the cavernous room full of file cabinets bursting with yellowing paper clippings and fading photos. It is manned by Jeff Roth (above), who provides broad comic relief as the eccentric keeper of the brittle files. With severely rolled-up sleeves and a self-deprecating demeanor, he takes the camera on a manic, dizzying tour of the archives, conveying the joys and frustrations of inheriting an impossibly complicated, archaic organizing system. Roth snaps off one-liners as relief from the mostly sober self-analysis of the obit writers themselves. In a word, he's a hoot.

The other star of the film is Bruce Weber, an introspective veteran pushing 60, who allows the cameras intimate access to his reporting and writing process as he spends a day on deadline reporting the death of John F. Kennedy's pioneering television adviser who famously orchestrated the pivotal Kennedy-Nixon debate late in the 1960 campaign. We see Weber meticulously interview the widow, nailing down the nuts and bolts as well as digging deeper into conversation for the details that will make the obituary come alive. For the camera, Weber spins a few entertaining journalism stories as well as waxing philosophical about confronting death daily for a living. We observe his hunt-and-peck typing style as he agonizes over the lede (opening paragraph(s) of the story) while his editor pitches the story for some front-page play. Weber embodies the heart and soul of a career reporter and writer. (He called it a career at the Times in 2016.)

And then there's Margalit Fox, certainly a talented journalist and vivid interview subject. Fox has an unflagging devotion to the English language and the written word, for better and for worse. She deserves some credit for enlivening a long-moribund genre, but she doesn't know her limits, and neither do her editors. We first flagged Fox in 2011 when we were regularly contributing to the internet bulletin board Testy Copy Editors (now on Facebook). We coined the phrase "obit noir" to describe her flowery writing and penchant for ending her pieces with a flourish, resorting to film-noir scene setting and purple prose (she has "the best words," like lachrymose) to convey what often seemed to be apocryphal anecdotes as punchlines. (The posts are collected on this thread between 2011 and 2013. Exhibit A is her obit of Lawrence Eagleburger.) On camera, Fox alternates between frothy exaggerations and tedious statements of the obvious. (It takes her numerous sentences to explain the simple concept that an inordinate number of obituary subjects are white males merely because they made their reputations decades ago when white males dominated politics, industry and entertainment. Noted.) Her theatrics and thesaurus-rex verbosity will either evoke admiration or annoyance.

Gould, however, juggles these and other personalities well.  The filmmaker certainly did her homework; she pays attention to detail, getting much of the small stuff right. She has a nose for pithy coffee-mug slogans and bulletin board clippings (usually of the gallows variety) endemic in the workplace. She studies the pitfalls of fact-gathering and fact-checking. She explains how a lede works and the tradition of writing obituaries in advance to have a bunch in the can ready to go in case a famous celeb or politician dies. She has one of the writers conduct a dramatic reading from a ridiculously cheesy obit from the 1930s to show how the form has morphed from cringe-inducing over-the-top euphemisms about subjects passing into the next realm to be greeted by angels on high, to the matter-of-fact style of the present day (and the ban on unnecessary alternatives to the word "died").

She notes the famous yarn about the death of Farrah Fawcett, who normally would have gotten pretty good play in the next day's paper had she not been overwhelmed within hours by bombshell reports of the afternoon death of Michael Jackson, which set off a deadline frenzy. She brings in music writer Jon Pareles to talk about the appreciation he whipped up in a few hours.

The filmmaker also is wise enough to follow up with Weber the next day to see how his story turned out and how it was played. Wouldn't you know it, he got a fact wrong. (If you pay close attention, it is foreshadowed during his phone interview with the widow.) Then again she fails to show us the lede that Paul Vitello agonized over all day while working on the obit of '60s ad man Dick Rich; here's a link to it.

Gould expertly works in clips of many of the obituary subjects. (A highlight is John Fairfax [1937-2012], who was the first person to row across an ocean.) The footage -- mostly grainy black-and-white or ambered -- brought to mind the wistful late '80s "time machine" ABC News series "Our World" with Linda Ellerbee. Late in the film Gould reels off a roll call of famous recent obit subjects -- Prince, David Bowie, Maya Angelou -- with a grace that brings to mind an award show's "In Memoriam" segment and which elicited "aahs" from various enclaves of the audience as the subjects flashed on the screen.

Maybe I was just in the mood for this one and was watching it with rose-colored glasses; I'm a former newspaperman and undying fan and admirer of obituaries. I was also watching it with one of my former Albuquerque Tribune colleagues who had just penned the obituary of one of another of our former Trib alums. And "Obit" certainly is a bittersweet affair, keenly aware that all of the Times' obit writers are middle-aged and many of their readers probably older.

As newspapers die off -- and its inveterate former staffers do as well -- it's worth documenting the golden years of an age when a news organization devoted so much time, effort, and care to thoughtfully telling the life stories of those who made an impact in our culture. And to present that process so poetically on the big screen must warm the hearts not just of cranky old journalists but of others who care about the written word.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer:


 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Loved this movie, and I really wanted to stop the film frequently and check out the surroundings: items in/on desks, photographs, paintings. (I already requested Weber's most recent book, casually left open on his desk, from the library.) Fascinating look at a job I always envied!