Tell Them Who You Are Movie Review:


Freud aside, fathers and sons can be a volatile, competitive mix. Especially when dad belittled the boy, is resented for womanizing and leaving the artist mother after thirty years, and today still bosses around the “such a mess” grown offspring; when the sire is an old-stripe leftist who constantly “rants” politics, and the son a conservative proud of contacts with business-oriented U.S. presidents; when the octogenarian is obscene and cantankerous in the real Henry Fonda mold, while the forty-eight-year-old shows wimpy and self-effacing; when their professions overlap, and the senior is four-time Oscar-winning cinematographer, director, scriptwriter, commercial maker, producer and hard-living Haskell Wexler, and the junior the prize-winning photojournalist, documentarist and writer in his own right, Mark S. Wexler.

Produced, directed, photographed and with non-intrusive narration co-authored by the latter, “Tell Them Who You Are” sets out to be, and on one level is, an interview- and film clip-supported account of Haskell’s illustrious career. As such, it traces his privileged background in Chicago, financially inauspicious first steps in cinema, his rise to industry prestige and in large part personality-caused fall to a proud, pathetic present. For fifty years, going back notably to “The Living City” (1953) and “The Savage Eye” (1959), his was a major innovative contribution to numerous (often sociopolitically charged) classics, fiction and –non.

So many films, indeed, that, after initial recognition enthusiasm, the casual viewer may weary of snips from movies and of actors’ and technical people’s praises. But this film separates itself from, and rises above, the usual uncritical retrospective in that its star is an unbending talent self-destructively flawed, a figure who cannot leave his soap box and admit his own tragic humanity. Further, and at least equally poignant, the man is a father who needs to find his son just as desperately as that son seeks to build a bridge to the other, who must first be broken.

Hints and flat-out statements of Haskell’s hubris are to be had earlier, among or subtly beneath the star-studded heads who talk about, and occasionally against, the man. On the outs with Hollywood more because of personality than his well-maintained years, he sarcastically baits and directs his own blood who is directing this movie. Noting his own father’s demanding character, Michael Douglas, who had the cinematographer replaced during shooting, recalls “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” as “the worst experience of my career,” Elia Kazan “didn’t like him but he’s a good cameraman,” and the senior Wexler himself hits the nail on the head: “I always felt I could direct better than the director.”

Opening with Haskell showing some of his stored Culver City equipment, the film will end with his sadly selling the gear after unsuccessful interviews for work. (Admirer John Sayles eventually took him aboard for “Silver City.”) In between, the father does not let up on verbal jabs at the son he condescendingly calls “Marco,” and the two drive to a 2003 anti-war rally in San Francisco, paralleling their presence in 1968 Chicago, out of which came the “fiction and so-called reality” of “Medium Cool.” Bitingly denying government and F.B.I. claims that he started the riots for that film -- “I wish I had that power” -- the father gives not an inch of filial ground. Jane Fonda cares deeply for the man and reminds the son that “intimacy was not a gift among men of our fathers’ generation,” and, co-director with “Hanoi Jane” and Wexler of “Introduction to the Enemy” (1974), her ex-husband Tom Hayden remarks on his own Irish-father problems.

Haskell finally compliments Mark, on an informal interview they do with Julia Roberts in Taos, but the real “break[ing] down of walls that develop between father and son” is their visit to Rockport Home, to Mark’s Alzheimer’s wreck of a mother. Haskell does not concede, but cracks enough for tenderness of tears and shared memories “that nobody else in the world knows.” Clinging to crumbled dignity, Haskell distances his innermost self from his body of work. “It’s all should have -- a curse,” but, as Fonda wisely counsels, peace is made “before it’s too late,” and there is embrace as a baton is passed from one generation to the next.



Donald Levit

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