The default four-star documentary

I've fallen into a pattern with documentaries, which is that if they are competently made with even a hint of outside-the-box thinking, I am automatically going to give them four stars on Letterboxd.

Even if I found getting through them somewhat tedious, as I did with the 115-minute Paul McCartney documentary Man on the Run. 

Star ratings, it should be said, have two primary functions, in my view:

1) To indicate how much you personally liked a film;

2) To indicate how good this film is relative to its own goals/potential limitations. 

When it comes to documentaries, I often default to the second, more objective usage of the star rating, disregarding the more subjective usage. 

With documentaries, it is a given that you will not be equally interested in the subject matter across the whole genre. There are going to be films about things that speak to you personally, and films about things that don't. However, if you are a critic, you feel like your personal interest should be removed from the equation in assessing how well the film does what it sets out to do. In a way, this is true with any genre, since any individual critic is going to gravitate toward some and not toward others, and the star rating shouldn't suffer from that personal preference. But with documentaries I think it's even more clearly delineated.

So whether I am fully interested in the film the whole time may be more a function of whether I am fully interested in the subject matter, though I think you would also agree that a truly great film makes converts out of even people who are disinclined toward its topic. And that's why I do tend to give a well-made documentary four stars out of five, but no more than that, even if I find that its length or other parts of its execution try my patience. I think I assume that the length would try my patience less if I were more interested in the subject matter, though that's not a given, and unfortunately you can't really test it. 

The thing is, with Man on the Run, I am actually plenty interested in the subject matter. Although I am not nearly as familiar with Paul McCartney's solo career, I love the Beatles and have done so for a good 30 years now. And what McCartney did in the ten years following the Beatles' breakup is actually something I would like to know more about.

But ... 115 minutes of this was quite a lot. 

And here's the issue: it was largely undifferentiated. There are no talking head interviews in this doco, only archival footage. I should clarify that. Subjects are interviewed, but you don't see their talking heads. You see the archival footage and you hear their answers to questions -- but not the questions by documentarian Morgan Neville themselves -- over that footage. 

Even when the archival footage is as priceless as that included here, and even when it is strung together by interesting techniques in which images are played with on screen and bleed into one another, it's still too samey without the talking heads. And that leads it to feel quite repetitive, even as the narrative is moving forward through the approximately ten years that are covered here. 

Of course, there's a bit of a fallacy in saying that I missed the talking heads. Talking heads are generally the least interesting part of a documentary. So am I really saying Man on the Run would be better if I were looking at images of Paul McCartney sitting against a bland background in his early 80s?

I'm not saying that. I think all I'm really saying is that a movie does not deserve four stars if you are frequently checking to see how much time it has left, and if you don't feel specifically inspired or moved or uniquely informed by it. And that's kind of how I feel about Man on the Run.

So I didn't do it. I didn't give it the four stars. I gave it only 3.5.

And this is when I remind you, and myself, that 3.5 stars is a perfectly acceptable rating, and among some fellow critics who are harder on movies than I am, it's a great one. 

There's a funny footnote to this story.

I wrote this piece yesterday to get a head start on today. Truthfully, I just write the ideas whenever they come, and if that happens to be three in one day, I'll write them in one day (if I have time) and save them for the next available opening.

On my way home from work, after I had already written the rest of what you read above, I was listening to a podcast about pop chart history, and they were talking about one of the later albums by David Bowie -- one that critics recognized as a superlative example of his craft, but which didn't particularly connect with them or endure in their memories. The interviewee referred to critics giving it a "respectable gentleman's four stars." Which seems to suggest this is a struggle in the broader critical community, in situations where we want to show our respect for a piece of art, but also to indicate that something about it doesn't quite do it for us personally.

So maybe by this definition, Man on the Run is a four star-movie that I gave 3.5 stars -- opting, for once, for the subjective.