Go-fer Gone Wild

Operation Filmmaker is as compelling as reality TV

Not to tell the starting fall class of earnest Cleveland student filmmakers they’re going to graduate into a bleak job environment, but ... hope your associate’s degree is in burger flipping (or prostitution) as a career fallback. And while you’re cooking at an all-night fast-food joint or turning tricks in a restroom (probably both; employers like multi-taskers), it might occur to you that only an Iraqi refugee would have a tougher time getting a paying gig on a legit movie set.

Wrong. Operation Filmmaker, the new documentary by Nina Davenport, tells of one Muthana Mohmed, a movie-mad Baghdad youth, a film student whose Hollywood career ambitions and MTV-broadcast video diaries from U.S.-occupied Iraq came to the attention of actor-director Liev Schreiber and the producers of the film Everything is Illuminated. They arrange for Muthana to come to Prague as a production assistant on the location shoot. It’s quite a charming and pure Hollywood-liberal-do-gooder condescending conceit — taking to Tinseltown’s siliconized bosom an Arab kid fleeing Middle Eastern violence — to work on an adaptation of a prestige novel about Judaism, no less.

But the glow soon fades. Muthana proves unreliable and unenthused about the entry-level grind of the location shoot, brewing coffee for producers, doing legal clearances for product-placement and catering to L.A. nutjobs’ vegan diets. It may or may not be a consideration that Muthana vocally supports the American strike against Saddam and calls George W. Bush “a good guy” in a mini-community of dissenting left-wing arts types. But it certainly does become an issue when Muthana starts changing his story; he really wants to be an actor, not a go-fer; he wants to go home, he misses his mom; he wants to stay in Prague because his Shia Muslim family is getting terror threats, etc. Schreiber and crew grow as disappointed over their ungrateful exotic-pet set-boy, just as Muthana does over them.

With cross-cut interviews between the American filmmakers and Muthana, Operation Filmmaker starts to look like a reality TV producer’s dream: Celebrity Apprentice, without Donald Trump to referee — but with car bombs; documentarian Davenport cannily goes to Baghdad herself to compare-contrast how Muthana’s friends and middle-class family are faring. While the kid whines about feeling unfulfilled in his cinematic stint in Prague, his old cohorts struggle through frequent power blackouts, curfews and street massacres of the insurgency. “Men desperate for wages killed while looking for a days’ job,” narrates a BBC broadcast, then the scene cuts to a pile of blood-drenched but safely phony prop-corpses on Muthana’s set.
Muthana even turns against Davenport herself — or so her mise-en-scene says. One gets the feeling that there are other stories like this, of hopeful exiles and disillusion with the west, with the way the Bush administration’s maladroit regime change played out. Only this umpteenth Gulf War II nonfiction boasts Schreiber, Elijah Wood and The Rock as guest stars. Is Operation Filmmaker manipulative, contrived and somewhat aggravating? Yes, probably as much as Muthana himself. But, as with a lot of reality TV, you can get caught up in it and want to know what happens next. — Charles Cassady Jr.

Operation Filmmaker
Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall
At 7 p.m. Friday, October 10 and 3:15 p.m. Sunday, October 12



The Duchess


There are a lot of reasons to like this historical biography starring Keira Knightley as Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806), an ancestor of Princess Diana. One of them has nothing to do with the movie itself: Knightley, whose modest bustline is highlighted by the movie’s tightly corseted costumes, protested the studio’s plan to digitally enlarge her breasts in the movie posters. Somehow, we like her much better for that. Further, the movie, based on a book by Amanda Foreman and directed by Saul Dibb, is a dishy pleasure, all ravishing dresses, outlandish wigs, ornate sets and unusual sex — especially sex. Although Georgiana was an active campaigner for the Whig party and organizer of political and literary salons, she was better known, like her descendant Diana, for her trendsetting fashion and unusual marriage. The movie gives only cursory attention to Georgiana’s political activities, preferring to focus on the sexier parts of her life.

We first meet Georgiana at 17, when she is selected as a bride by the older Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), with the approval of her mother, Lady Spencer (wonderful Charlotte Rampling). The story is pure Jane Eyre gothic: Georgiana becomes a prisoner in her own home when she discovers, to her shock, that she has married the Duke of Churl. The Duke is cruelly distant, devoted only to his dogs and prone to marital rape in his single-minded pursuit of a male heir when Georgiana stubbornly produces only girls. Like Princess Di, she is beloved by the people but despised by her husband.

Wearing a series of Bride of Frankenstein wigs (one of which catches on fire during a campy “mad scene”), Georgiana flourishes in style and bears many children without gaining an ounce, but she remains deeply unhappy. She seeks solace with a friend, Lady Bess (Hayley Atwell of Brideshead Revisited), who moves into their castle as part of a bizarre ménage a trios with the Duke. (The Duke and Duchess’ marriage was an inspiration for Sheridan’s School for Scandal.) Desolate, Georgiana initiates a scandalous affair with Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), a future prime minister, and all sorts of bad things happen. It’s all a bit silly and of virtually no significance but quite pleasurable just the same. — Pamela Zoslov

Opens Friday areawide



My Winnipeg


Winnipeggian fabulist Guy Maddin ran into some trouble a few years back when he attempted to graft his quirky, one-of-a-kind cinematic style onto a larger, bigger-budgeted canvas in The Saddest Music in the World. What felt so blissfully ineffable — and ineffably strange — in early Maddin treasures like Careful teetered on the verge of self-parody or worse. But with last year’s masterful nouveau-silent Brand Upon the Brain, Maddin seemed to have recharged his creative batteries by returning to his bare-bones outsider roots. The director’s latest “whatzit?” is an equally uncategorizable, similarly dazzling hybrid of documentary and Proustian (or is that Maddin-ian?) memory piece. The hypnotic, dream-like tone is set by Maddin’s drolly purplish voiceover narration (“Snowy, sleeping Winnipeg ... always winter, always sleepy”) which both celebrates and bashes his Manitoba hometown, sometimes for the very same virtues/failings. Octogenarian Ann Savage (star of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 noir classic Detour) plays Maddin’s mother in mock simulations of his formative years spent atop a Winnipeg beauty parlor. Is the “Winnipeg” of My Winnipeg truly real, or merely a figment of Maddin’s typically overheated, if vastly amusing imagination? Who cares when the results are as laugh-out-loud funny and unaccountably moving as they are here? — Milan Paurich

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque
At 9:15 p.m. Saturday, October 11 and 7 p.m. Sunday, October 12



Wonders Are Many


With Wonders Are Many the movie-trivia warlord possesses the equivalent of refined plutonium; now you can tell all the clerks at the video store that you can name a film about nuclear warfare starring Peter Sellers — that is not Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellars, of course, being the innovative theatrical director (not the British comic actor), who has worked in collaboration with composer John Adams (not the Founding Father) on several very non-traditional operas. Wonders Are Many is a feature-length documentary partially about their collaboration on Dr. Atomic, a recent San Francisco Opera premiere that musicalizes the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the creation of the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos, the super-weapons dropped on Japan that decisively ended WWII.

More so than behind-the-scenes backstabbing and the brouhahas that attend a major legit-stage presentation, Wonders Are Many also aspires ambitiously to retell the Los Alamos/Oppenheimer saga more or less in full itself, complete with interviews and some basic physics lectures from scientist Freeman Dyson. The dawn of the nuclear age is hardly a new documentary subject; it was done in declassified detail in the epochal The Day After Trinity and nearly every other Nova episode you tune in. But by using opera glasses, as it were, as a fresh lens, the idea seems to be to cast a fresh light on the familiar topic. That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s a good one, considering filmmaker Jon Else not only made The Day After Trinity but also The Stagehand’s Ring Cycle, a highly amusing explication/appreciation of Richard Wagner.

In practice it’s a bit unwieldy. Oppenheimer, though a polymath who could speak multiple tongues (famously Sanskrit) and read poetry, “had no patience for opera.” Similarly, one may or may not be captivated by the pic split down the middle (sunders are many), between top-secret WWII R&D and Adams composing, or Sellers doing the blocking with singers Gerald Finley (as Oppie), Kris Jepson (as his wife) and Eric Owens (a formidable black baritone creatively cast as a white U.S. Army general). Yes, there’s a nice parallel, not rendered too heavy-handedly, about the mass-mobilization of talent needed to strategize an opera as well as the Manhattan Project. But even Sellers admits that this is one such occasion when art sort of pales before the megatons of a real-life event. History fans, meanwhile, might even learn a few bits they didn’t know. I hadn’t heard that the Pentagon, in the late 1950s, actually considered a nuclear strike against the moon, purely as a show of force. Sounds a bit like the Bush Doctrine (another potential opera subject right there). — CC

Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall
At 1:30 p.m. Sunday, October 12