The Windmill Movie (Sunday, June 21, 2009) (71)

So on my fifth documentary of the weekend, I really hit something great. This is a small and weird and interesting film about Richard (Dick) Rogers who spent most of his life filming his life - especially the summers he spent in Wainscott, Long Island at a fancy WASPy tennis club. In his life, he wanted to put the footage together as an autobiography, but mostly spent his time obsessing over the content and structure (at one point using actors to act out what was going on) and never making real progress on a film.

When he died of cancer in 2001, his widow/life partner (they only got married at the last moment) hired one of his students and protege, Alexander Olch, to do something with the footage. What comes out is a biography through erstwhile autobiography. We watch the film through Rogers' eye (or camera), sometimes with his voice over. He does seem guilty of his patrician WASPdom, for instance, the fact that he inherited a house on Long Island and didn't buy it. His inability to work on the 'Windmill movie' (which refers not only to Don Quixote, or course, but also to a windmill that sits at the country club in Wainscott) becomes a constant subject and an obsession of Rogers.

Another obsession is women and fucking and this is also the root of much of the drama in the film (at times he has two girlfriends who either know or don't know about the other). Oh - and one of Rogers' best friends is Wallace Shawn and maybe Bob Balaban (though its not clear that Balaban is a friend of Rogers or just of Wally). We see the two actors/writers walking though Rogers' Long Island house after his death - and see Wally reading lines that we had previously seen footage of Rogers speaking.

At a point in the film, Olch comes on in voice over saying that the good footage that has Rogers' narration on it is running out, so he will be reading from Rogers' diary and showing footage he shot from that point on. So we get silent footage that Rogers shot (lots of 'landscapes' and filler, plastic footage), footage with him narrating, footage with Olch narrating in Rogers' voice (from his journal), an actor playing Rogers and finally Wallace Shawn playing Rogers (and dressed in clothes we see Rogers wearing at one point). We get the sense that Roger's identity is totally intact, but like many of us, summing it up easily is difficult. At the same time we do get the idea of a rather constructed or plastic persona - in a way that I've rarely seen in other films. Is the man we come to know really the real man - or is he a construction too?

There is no mention of psychoanalysis here, but his mother does rather haunt him - especially his mother's family history and her WASPy life on Long Island. It's clear that his complicated relationship to his mother comes out in his rather bullheadish relationship with women and sex. Seeing this through the lens of his writing journal - being read by a third party is especially interesting and takes on the qualities of Rousseau's or Cellini's autobiographies. His sense of himself is at one moment that of a giant fuck-machine and at another time a pathetic, impotent artist struggling with his life's work.

I love the multi-facetedness of this and the fact that we are never lulled into easy viewing by a continuous and unchanging style. Instead we are always on our toes examining and re-examining him and his life - and he never really speaks directly to us.

Olch does a wonderful job in a directorial debut. The concept of sorting through the footage must be daunting (which is partly why, I guess, it took 8 years since Rogers died to see this film) - but to come up with this as a concept is fascinating and very impressive.

Stars: 4 of 4