Directed by Errol Morris
I just started following Errol Morris on Twitter. This is a bad thing for 2 reasons: 1) his amiable and charming personality make it difficult to say how I truly feel about Mr. Death and 2) after another glass of wine I'm bound to tell him exactly how I feel in the form of belligerent haiku. As I've alluded to my "real feelings" you're correct to assume they aren't the most generous, but let me explain.
Mr. Death begins with an electric light Tesla coil orgy done to the utmost Sci-fi degree. Fred Leuchter's bespectacled face is illuminated sporadically by flashes of blue light as Dr. Frankenstein on a stormy night. The theatrical mad scientist trope sets the mood for the rest of the cinematic style of the film which consists mostly of talk-to-the-camera shots and home video spliced with dramatically lit studio shots of scientific experiments. Overall, the style was smooth and well paced if not slightly overly theatrical.
The first 40 minutes or so the film focused on Leuchter's line of work as an engineer concerned about the humanity and dignity of capitol punishment. His job was to make electric chairs, lethal injection devices, and (most surprisingly) gallows more effective in their ability to kill faster, cleaner, and do so with precision as many devices worked improperly resulting in eyeballs flying across rooms, flesh falling off the bone like from an overcooked chicken, and cranial conflagration. With these hazards eliminated inmates would die speedier, "more dignified" deaths. All of this was very interesting within the context of the American judicial system, but the second half of the film departed from this into bizarre territory.
Once the background was laid out the story took an unexpected turn in the direction of revisionist history and Holocaust denial. The rest of film was Leuchter's involvement in a case against Ernst Zundel for publishing a "historical" book on the "myth" of the Holocaust. Zundel used Leuchter to investigate the likelihood of the usage of gas chambers at Auschwitz. Because, of course, there was so much doubt. Leuchter ended up chipping pieces of brick and stone from several buildings and concluding that there was no cyanide residue to found, therefore there were no gas chambers, therefore there was no Holocaust. All of this is then coupled with factual rebuttals from trained scientists and legitimate historians thus proving what the audience has already gathered--These guys are fucking insane. As much as I love seeing them disproved, albeit not to their faces, the director dwells on this back and forth of the crazy/non-crazy dialogue. In other words the second half was boring. The classic switch and drag. The director moves the story to what initially seems like an interesting sidenote but spends way too much time repeating the obvious and making the audience sit through an over-analyzed defense of the Holocaust. Thank you. We get it.
3 out 5 dead elephants
Hmm. Sounds like I wouldn't like this guy. Humane execution methods just make it less apparent to the t-shirts that there's death going on. If we have to be murderers, I vote hatchet execution. P.S. Odd how much Holocaust deniers and Ben Stein have in common. (Ahem. Their respective capacities for reason.)
ReplyDeleteI probably agree with you on this one. Avoid mundane concluding paragraphs about "but I liked the cinematography." You should pursue Errol Morris; his police detective story "thin blue line?" and his documentary about obsessive people including a guy who loves mole rats. This last one is a masterpiece. But slow, like all EM's films. A thesis that compares his view of the human condition to that of the Maysles Bros? Look up these major people in excellent film magazines like "Sight and Sound." Go to our Renne library and leaf thru our stacks of "Sight and Sound" for further inspiration.
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