Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

"Tell Them Who You Are" (henceforth TT, 2004), like Nathaniel Kahn's "My Architect," is a pained documentary by a son trying to figure out who the difficult artistic father who abandoned him(/his mother) is. In this instance, the father (Haskell Wexler-HW) of the documentary film-maker (Mark Wexler-MW) is still very much alive (he has five credits since the documentary was shot) and allows his son to film him. Being a cinematographer (who won Oscars for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" and "Bound for Glory" and the "American Society of Cinematographers' Award for "Blaze"), HW also films back. And verbally, he definitely shoots back.

Haskell Wexler's reputation as a great cinematographer is accompanied by a reputation as difficult to work with. TT has archival footage of Elia Kazan praising HW's work on "America, America" (1963) and saying he would never work with HW again. (Given HW's politics, I'm surprised that he worked with Kazan. MW does not ask HW about that, alas.) Both the producer of the multiple Oscar-winning (and in my view overrated) "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (Michael Douglas) and its director (Milos Forman) tell MW('s camera) that working with his father was a very unpleasant experience, primarily because HW was undermining Forman and seeming to abrogate directing to himself. (MW had directed the acclaimed -- and in my view also overrated -- "Medium Cool" (1969) and thought that he could have done a better job directing most of the movies on which he was director of photography.) HW was fired from "Cuckoo's Nest" and also by Francis Ford Coppola from "The Conversation," and by Terrence Malick from "Days of Heaven." (Presumably, Coppola declined MW's invitation to talk about the experience. Malilck is so legendarily a recluse that he may not have been asked. HW shot the bravura opening of "The Conversation" and says he shot at least half of "Days of Heaven." He received shared credit for "Cuckoo's Nest" but not for "Days of Heaven.")

Jane Fonda tells MW that their father's generation was not good at intimacy (and that if there is going to be any overcoming of their reticence, the child has to make the first move). MW tells HW that he frequently felt undermined by his demanding and irascible father. And the documentary frequently shows HW criticizing MW and questioning his competence as a film-maker.

While the film shows HW at 80 was still an impatient father, it also shows a son going out of his way to push his father's buttons. MW giving his father a photo of MW with the senior President Bush for HW's 80th birthday is a provocation, knowing HW's disdain for the Bush dynasty and the junior one's invasion of Iraq. With so left-wing a father, the son's rebellion is somewhere between worship of authoritarians and apopliticalness. (MW's previous documentary was about Air Force One, work that led to his being photographed with then-president Clinton and with his predecessors. As an adolescent, MW road around with police as a budding documentary still-photographer.)

HW's close friend and business partner and MW's surrogate father (and eventually father-in-law) Conrad Hall comes across as far more pleasant to be around and notably less political than HW. Hall was dying while the documentary was being shot and it is something of a tribute to him.

I wish that the documentary was more about HW's work (in particular, what he did that was special, not just what films he photographed), less about Mark's Oedipal (melo)drama. HW himself did not want it to be primarily about his career. What he wanted was not more inquiry into the fraught father-son dynamics, but more attention to his leftwing politics, but he proved willing to address (and, perhaps more importantly for MW, listen to) the dynamics of the relationship between the father and the son of a divorced wife.

I sometimes found it embarrassing to watch the psychodrama. I thought HW was grating. In that his career undoubtedly was hurt by his irascibility and rebellion against the authority and intentions of directors, showing this is not only relevant but revealing. Nonetheless, it and MW's neediness and his own gratuitous annoying of his father make me wince. After an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco, HW wants to speak about its meaning for him. MW refuses to include that (not very subtle rebellion), instead including the scene of frustrating his father by being more interested in the light than in the content -- how like a cinematographer, but, wait, the cinematographer is HW!)

The movie made me glad that HW is not my father and that MW is not my son! (If I had an undermining parent, it was not my father.)

I have not seen any of HW's nine documentaries or the other (than "Medium Cool") combination of fiction film and documentary (Latino, 1985). I realized after watching it, that there was quite a bit of information on HW's career in movies -- and of HW's view of government pressure against the release of "Latino" and in his firing from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (the former is more plausible to me than the latter).

Among the interviewees, in addition to Conrad Hall and Jane Fonda, Milos Forman and Michael Douglas, all of whom I have already mentioned, the most insightful comments come from Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night), George Lucas (American Graffiti) and Tom Hayden (Introduction to the Enemy). The sequence near Taos, NM of HW interviewing Julia Roberts is quite entertaining, too.

I think the audience to which "Tell Them Who You Are" would most appeal is sons nurturing grievances against their fathers. The secondary audience is those interested in very politically committed film-makers. (Politics is central to a number of the films HW shot, including The Best Man, Medium Cool, the Trial of the Catonville Nine, In the Heat of the Night, Bound for Glory, Matewan, Blaze; but he also shot 61*, The Loved One, Coming Home, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?)

I felt more sympathy for Nathaniel Kahn, who barely knew his long-dead father, architect Louis Kahn, than for MW. I also thought that Nathaniel Kahn did a better job of showing what his father wrought than MW did. On the other hand, HW could answer back to questions and react to his sometimes annoying son, as Louis Kahn could not.

"My Architect" was good therapy for the son. TT seems more a record of impasses and blockages than good therapy for MW, but he has to be pleased that his father trusted him enough to let MW portray himself in relation both to MW and to his ex-wife, MW's mother.


© 2008, Stephen O. Murray


BTW, the title is something of MW's invitation to HW, but originally was something HW told MW, meaning tell people in "the business" that you are the son of Haskell Wexler (to get their attention, but given HW's reputation for being difficult a two-edged sword, and as TT makes clear, MW wanted to make his own career not gain entrée by being HW's son).



Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD