Doc Watch: ... Ever After

 

THE PRINCESS (B) - It's difficult to empathize with Britain's royal family, but this documentary is a powerful review of the media feeding frenzy that descended on Diana Spencer and never let up. It skips narration and just lets the raw footage tell the story in chronological order.

Ed Perkins, who offered up the head-scratcher "Tell Me Who I Am" a few years ago, is more in control here as a curator of video archives. He provides unvarnished video, unspooling it in chronological order. We are all presumed to know the backstory and the tragic end, so there is really no need for context or elucidation.

Perkins persistently points our attention toward the media gaggle that followed the every move of Diana and Prince Charles from the very start, when he plucked her from relative obscurity. (Their lack of chemistry is apparent all along.) In the glare here are not just the pestering paparazzi of the tabloids of the day, but every facet of the mainstream media, from all over the world, which just would not let Diana have a moment's peace. It was all quite the pre-internet phenomenon.

The portrait of her is fairly sympathetic (recall that she could shoot off quite the disarming side-glances), though it does not overlook her flaws and poor choices. In retrospect, her defiance of the House of Windsor seems rather bold, and she truly lent her time and influence to worthy causes. It is interesting to watch her blossom over time and come into her own as a person (and celebrity). Time and again, though, Perkins focuses on the scribes and photographers perpetually hounding Diana, right up until the moment she dies, a martyrdom that, 25 years ago this month, now seems quaint and anticlimactic.

BONUS TRACK

We usually avoid TV miniseries here, but allow us a quick mention of the trainwreck that is the six-part HBO documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, "The Last Movie Stars." Right there in the title, you can tell that this collaboration between actor Ethan Hawke and Newman's daughters is pretty much full of crap. This is a six-hour wank by hipster actors waxing rhapsodic -- mostly in low-grade Zoom videos -- about some mythical bygone era of fairytale stardom. In meta fashion, this project -- like the press that originally covered Newman and Woodward -- glorifies the couple and generally glances past their human flaws. 

Newman and Woodward -- she the actor's actor, he the pretty boy who became a star -- are interesting enough for your standard documentary treatment. They were together for about 50 years, raising his and their children. (One of the few interesting revelations is Woodward saying more than once that she might not have had kids if she'd had it to do all over again.) But the documentary spends remarkably little time exploring them as a couple; instead their separate movie clips dominate (though they did work together more than a dozen times over the years).

The main problem here is the presentation. Hawke is a fanboy of all of his guests, most of whom were recruited to read transcripts of interviews from a biographical project that Newman had long abandoned (and destroyed the audio tapes for). The participants seem randomly selected, and they seem to compete to see who can appear to be the most regular person. (Extra points to Sam Rockwell for his surely artfully coiffed bad-boy bed-head. Paging Nastassja Kinski.) They constantly pontificate regarding the Fine Art of Acting (theater people!) and lavish endless praise on Newman and Woodward, even when it's obvious that Newman is usually lagging in third or fourth place in many of his classic films. (Imagine "Cool Hand Luke" without George Kennedy.) George Clooney voices Newman as if he is doing so while cleaning out his closet; and one of Hawke's pals thought it would be a good idea to do a broad impersonation of Gore Vidal. 

Rabbit holes include excessive details about Woodward's childhood and countless minutes spent with Newman's ex-wife. (There is easily enough fat here to cut it at least in half.) Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the documentary is a tiny nitpick that I could not let go of. Hawke uses the trite visual of showing a cassette tape spinning while one of the actors is reading from the transcript, a visual crutch that has been done to death -- even though he makes abundantly clear from the start that Newman destroyed the actual tapes. It's such a glaring, labored contrivance.

This works occasionally if you make generous use of the fast-forward button or, as a friend did, use it like a background podcast while you clean the house.