Fastidious, expensive & completely controlled

Last year I wrote a piece on this blog detailing my top ten documentaries, according to where I had them ranked on Flickchart. I then listed my next ten as honorable mentions, making 20 total.

Nowhere on this list of 20 was a film by the great Errol Morris, a fact indelicately pointed out to me by a commenter on the Flickchart blog, where the piece was reprinted. He wrote: "No Errol Morris? No Herzog? Do you really like documentaries ... or just nice film posters?" (The presentation on the Flickchart blog is heavy on the artwork).

I felt a bit annoyed by this accusation that I might not be a "real" documentary fan if I didn't cherish Morris' work more than I do. But that set me to thinking about why I don't love his work. After all, I do consider him "great" -- he's probably one of the finest and most accomplished documentarians we have.

I've seen five films by Morris, two of which (The Thin Blue Line and Tabloid) I've seen since writing that post. In fact, The Thin Blue Line (1988), his masterpiece, would certainly make that list if I were making it today. But neither Tabloid nor the other three (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and The Fog of War) would.

It's his 1997 film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control I saw first, and I still consider it representative of what he's trying to accomplish as an artist -- or not accomplish, as the case may be. You'll be disappointed to know it doesn't feature loose women with day-old mascara smudged across their faces. It's actually a portrait of four eccentric experts in four unusual and unrelated fields: a topiary artist, a lion tamer, an expert in mole rats and a scientist who makes bug-like robots. It's probably no surprise that Morris sees himself in these passionate pursuers of their respective crafts.

It was this film that introduced me to Morris' trademark style. The prototypical Morris film relies heavily on beautiful camerawork that's outside the box, including unusual close-ups and angles, and interview subjects talking directly to the camera. Morris' films also rely on a lot of slow-motion and a lot of what you might consider B-roll, an indulgence I interpret to indicate his preference for presenting beauty over his preference for presenting truth. He also employs a score almost constantly, usually one that's fairly reliant on a dominant instrument like the violin or the piano.

So while it's possible to find yourself wrapped in a certain spell as you are watching the beauty of Morris' craft, I'd argue that this beauty may be skin deep. Even when his subject matter is not frivolous, such as the modern history of the U.S. involvement in foreign wars, it seems like it exists primarily to serve his aesthetic sensibilities. And that's why none of Morris' films had yet penetrated their way into my top 20 at the time I wrote that piece.

Okay, how does this all relate to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which I saw last night as the back end of a double feature with Richard Linklater's Bernie?

Simply put, I thought director David Gelb was doing his best Morris impersonation, right down to using a Philip Glass score. (Morris used Glass in at least three of his films.) And that's why I'm not compelled to wax rapturous over Jiro, even though many critics have, and even though it is, without a doubt, an excellent film of which a great documentarian like Morris would be proud.

Specifically, I saw Fast, Cheap & Out of Control everywhere in this movie -- even though those terms apply even less to the craft of making sushi than they do to the four crafts highlighted in Morris' film.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is the story of 85-year-old Jiro Ono, a world-renowned sushi master whose restaurant is located in a Tokyo subway station and can seat only ten customers at once. Thanks to a tireless dedication to his craft (which has included making apprentices of his two sons), his restaurant has received one of the highest ratings for any restaurant in the world, and customers book reservations months in advance. A 20-piece meal starts at 30,000 yen, or $300. But no customer ever leaves unsatisfied, in part because Jiro has mastered his palate and technique over the course of 75 years of maki sushi.

Gelb's film is absolutely beautiful, which shouldn't surprise you, since I'm comparing him to Morris. There are any number of mouth-watering shots of a hand depositing a freshly cut roll on the marble slab off of which it will be eaten, glistening with the sauce that has just been brushed on its surface, drooping ever so slightly as gravity starts to have its effect on the buoyant concoction. My words pale in comparison to the beauty of these images.

But is that all they are? In fact, is that all Jiro is? Just a bunch of beautiful shots of raw fish? Where's the meat, as it were?

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is only 81 minutes long, but it feels like it could be 20 minutes shorter. The problem is that there's not much of a narrative. The conflict, to the extent that there is one, is that Jiro's 50-year-old eldest son is essentially waiting for his father to retire so he can assume the position of sushi master at his father's restaurant. After all, his younger brother, who is not duty bound to follow directly in his father's footsteps, has already opened a successful restaurant across town.

Gelb faces a bit of a problem in that he is limited by the culture of his interview subjects, who are all quite traditional in their ways. Because filial piety is such a highly regarded trait in Japan, neither son is going to say the remotest thing negative about his father. What's more, any negative feelings they have toward one another are similarly repressed. So there is not, naturally, going to be any drama springing from these interviews.

Instead, we have what amounts to a loving montage on the process and dedication involved with the creation of great sushi. In many ways this is a joy to watch. In some other ways, it leaves a person hungry, as it were.

I imagine that those who disagree with me would say this, and they would have a good point: There is drama in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, it's just not the kind of open, unfiltered drama you might get in other documentaries. Jiro's eldest son, Yoshikazu, may not tell the camera of his frustration at still being only an apprentice to his genius father at the age of 50, at least not with his words. But it's there, in nearly imperceptible looks and glances, perhaps all the more powerful for the fact that it must go unspoken.

And this is why I hesitate to even write what may be construed as a "negative" piece about Jiro Dreams of Sushi. After all, if it seemed drawn out, that could have been because it was my second movie of the night and I started it at 9:45. This is a very good movie, and you should see it.

But if you have the same hesitations about Errol Morris that I have, just know that coming in.

Yesterday's news

If you were to place all consumable information on a continuum representing its ability to endure, with newspaper articles on one end and novels on the other, most feature films would be a lot closer to the novel end of the spectrum, and most documentaries would be a lot closer to the newspaper article.

A newspaper article, in its essence, is something consumed quickly, perhaps not even completely, then thrown away. A novel, on the other hand, can be timeless, something you would still want to read more than 500 years after it was written. (Even though there were more plays and epic poems being written 500 years ago than novels as we understand them today.)

It's too early to know how films will endure relative to the great works of literature, but I think it's safe to say we'll care about fiction films a lot longer than we'll care about documentaries. At least culturally, if not historically.

This past weekend, I saw Charles Ferguon's Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight, which was released in 2007. It's a very good film and it's only four years old, but there's a reason I got approved to review it in October of 2009 and am only just now getting around to watching it.

Namely, the "end" of the Iraq War actually is in sight. Troop withdrawal is picking up speed as we speak.

You might say that there's an end in sight for the relevance of No End in Sight.

Just because the film's title is necessarily fleeting, tied to the specific moment in time in which it was made, doesn't make it less worthwhile as a viewing experience. But I'd argue that it does make a 2011 viewer slightly less eager to seek it out. Perhaps more than slightly.

And as this idea occurred to me, I realized that many documentaries out there have sort of an "expiration date" -- a date after which the topics in the film no longer have the social resonance they had when the documentarian first envisioned making the film.

Consider this: How often do you go back and watch old fiction films? If you're a big film fan, it's pretty often, right?

Now, how often do you seek out old documentaries?

[Sound of crickets chirping.]

That's because we generally don't. Perhaps without even realizing it, we limit our documentary intake to those documentaries made within the past five years. However, as No End in Sight indicates, even five years can be long enough for the film to have lost its immediacy.

Now, this certainly does not apply to all documentaries. Some documentaries are purely historical in nature, where all the footage is archival, and all the interview subjects are reflecting on something in the past, at some point after the fact, with the date of their reflection being somewhat irrelevant. And then there are those documentaries that are essentially divorced from time altogether, such as Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, in which Errol Morris looks at the lives of four men who are obsessed with their various professions (a lion tamer, a topiary artist, a hairless-mole expert and a designer of bug-sized robots).

But even films like Fast, Cheap and Out of Control have probably been lost to all but the most dedicated fans of documentary filmmaking, who would be inclined to study the entire career of a great documentarian like Errol Morris. Merely by being a documentary, this film gets lumped in with its of-the-moment brethren, eventually lost in oblivion as far as most movie fans are concerned.

And although Fast, Cheap and Out of Control did not get nominated for an Oscar in 1997, the nominees from that year more or less bear out my theory. Only Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls is a film I'm sure I remember, though I did not see it. The others are The Long Way Home, about the creation of the Israeli state after the Holocaust, which won the Oscar; Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, about writer Ayn Rand; Waco: The Rules of Engagement, about the 1993 standoff between the Branch Davidians and the FBI; and Colors Straight Up, about at-risk teens in Los Angeles trying to stay off the streets through various arts programs (though I had to search beyond wikipedia to get even that description of the film). The Waco movie in particular is a perfect example of the kind of documentary that's pegged off a news event from a particular moment, which may not speak to a 2011 documentary audience in an ongoing way that would make them seek it out.

So what point am I trying to make here?

I guess it's this: As discussed here, documentaries are some of the most consistently high quality examples of filmmaking we have, but if you don't see them during their brief window of maximum relevance, you might as well forget it. Even with the documentary that many people consider the greatest of all time -- Hoop Dreams -- you don't hear fellow movie fans talk about revisiting it, do you? And if they didn't see it back in the early 1990s, you don't hear them talk about paying it a first visit at all.

The greatest feature film? Citizen Kane, maybe? Casablanca? The Godfather? New film fans are discovering these movies every day, even though two of them were released in the 1940s and the other released in the 1970s.

And this could be because in the universe of fiction, there's no way to know exactly what came next, to know whether subsequent events invalidated what we're seeing in the movie. Even where there are sequels -- such as Godfather II and Godfather III -- those sequels build on the narrative of the original in (hopefully) satisfying ways. And no matter how many sequels there are, we still don't know what came after the final sequel.

It's a bit different with documentaries. When a film bemoans the "quagmire" -- to quote a word from which Donald Rumsfeld famously dissociated himself -- of a misguided war that's seemingly without end, and you watch it during the period of time when the war is actually sort of ending, you lose a little something. It's like real life should have given you a spoiler alert.

Don't get me wrong -- I found No End in Sight captivating. I learned things I didn't quite know previously, like what a foolhardy thing it was to dissolve the Iraqi National Army. That decision -- made recklessly and without consulting the proper experts, as the film demonstrates -- left thousands of military-trained Iraqis out of a job, angry, primed and ready to become insurgents. That decision alone may have cost a thousand American lives. Without seeing the movie, this is a part of the Iraq War whose significance may have been permanently lost on me.

But let's be honest. I watched the movie because I was getting paid to review it. This makes me very different from the average viewer seeking out No End in Sight in the year 2011.

Or more likely, not seeking it out at all.