The Invisible War: A few years back, director Kirby Dick made a great doc about the aftermath of abuse, Twist of Faith. It centred on a man who was molested as a child by a priest, and part of what made it great is that it went beyond simply deploring abuse to show how a victim’s rage and resentment can metastasize into a deeply destructive force in its own right. His latest, about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military, doesn’t burrow quite that deep. The focus here is on illuminating an urgent, routinely concealed issue, and on that level it’s superb. Dick talks to an astounding number of female ex-soldiers (as well as one male) who were raped by comrades or superiors (sometimes repeatedly), then he shows how the military hierarchy condones and reinforces the assailants. Unlike, say, Michael Moore, Dick doesn’t milk your outrage — he elicits it calmly and rationally, allowing the women’s stories to speak for themselves. ★★★
Screens May 5 at 3:15 pm.
Tchoupitoulas: A shot of pure movie bliss. Directors Bill and Turner Ross train their camera on a 10-year-old boy named William and his two older brothers as they wander the streets of New Orleans’s French Quarter after dark, taking in the sights and sounds. That’s the whole premise, and if you can get on the filmmakers’ wavelength, they cast a deeply entrancing spell. The movie reawakens memories of your own first solo excursions into the world, when the nighttime activities of adults felt new and impossibly enticing. The boys take in their share of illicit sights — burlesque dancers, drunken pick-ups — but even the most mundane moments, like a guy making pizza, prove riveting. Though the central scenario is a fiction, the boys were unscripted and the encounters unstaged. This kind of “controlled” doc (in the vein of “Free Cinema” classics like Louisiana Story and On the Bowery) hasn’t been much in fashion lately, and that’s a real shame. Tchoupitoulas makes more straightforward, “authentic” docs look rigid and dowdy by comparison. ★★★★
Screens May 5 at 10 pm.
Credit: Michael Kubaszak
Jeff: It would be impossible to make a boring documentary about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but director Chris James Thompson comes close. Roughly half the movie is taken up by the usual talking heads, but the other half is spent watching an actor playing Dahmer conduct menial chores related to the killings: buying huge quantities of bleach at the grocery store; bringing home a blue plastic drum on the bus; etc. The recreations are jarring, amateurishly shot, and needlessly long, and they stop the movie cold every time. The three talking heads — a detective who gained Dahmer’s confession, the coroner on the case, and a former neighbour — are more interesting, but only the neighbour conveys any sense of the horror of the story. The detective is almost unseemly in his enthusiasm, as if he were a teenager caught up in a lurid potboiler. That could’ve been an interesting angle, but it goes unexamined, and in any case, you get the sense Thompson may have been stoking the detective’s enthusiasm, not simply recording it. ★
Screens May 4 at 9:45 pm.
Off Label: If you go into this doc about big pharma expecting a straightforward examination full of facts and figures, you’ll come out disappointed. Instead, it’s a mosaic of personal tales of off-label drug use, and if it sometimes feels a little too glancing, it also gets at some higher truths. By exploring a vast array of characters — ex-pharmaceutical reps ashamed about peddling their wares too hard; professional guinea pigs making their livings as test subjects; ordinary people downing staggering quantities of prescription pills — directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher (October Country) show how we’re all somewhat complicit in the medicalization of modern life. The final sequences, in which many of the interview subjects pursue healing via other methods, are unexpectedly touching, and they help make up for the many questions left unanswered. ★★★
Screens May 5 at 9:15 pm.
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Hot Docs Festival runs from April 26 to May 6, 2012 | Tickets are available online.
Scott MacDonald writes about cinema for Toronto Standard.
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