Where's Kent Williams When You Need Him?

Katjusa Cisar reviews Errol Morris' latest film, Standard Operating Procedure at The Cap Times yesterday. While she makes some good observations, I have a bit of advice for her: watch Morris' previous films. You come across as a total maroon when you say, "…has been tainted by his apparent penchant for slick reenactments". Have you ever heard of a little film he did called The Thin Blue Line? Or The Fog of War which won an Academy Award?



Saying that Morris has a penchant for reenactments is like saying that John Woo apparently has a penchant for shoot outs. You do realize he's done more films since Vernon, Florida, I hope. I guess not because, if she had, Ms. Cisar would understand there's nothing apparent about this penchant which just happens to be a major part of Morris' style. She also remarks, "Here, in contrast, Morris rips his subjects out of their environs, depicting them only with head-and-shoulders shots in front of a plain studio background." Hello…? Mr. Death ring a bell? Read up on the Interrotron some time. Why is his choice of framing bad? What effect does direct eye contact have in Morris' films?

"The reenactments add little to the documentary and have the unsettling effect of looking like a Nike commercial."

This, Ms. Cisar, is because you went to the film expecting a Frontline documentary or a conventional look at the psychology of the soldiers involved. Instead you got something very different and apparently could make neither heads nor tails of it. Did you spend any time trying to understand what those staged scenes do for the film? How do these scenes relate to the interviews? How do they affect the pacing, the flow of the film?

Morris is a former gumshoe and he's spent hours in his films entertaining the notion of truth – watch The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, and The Fog of War. Listen to this interview with Morris by Christopher Lydon. You get to the heart of what intrigues Morris when you ask, "Where is the big-T "Truth" in these photos?" but you dismiss this, the kernel of things, after but one paragraph. No wonder this review is so terrible. Ms. Cisar stumbles onto the director's favorite theme and then forgets about it as if she'd never come across it in the first place. She wants "an emotional and disturbing expose of the soldiers' inner psychology" but, since that's not what Morris' has on offer, the director's stylistic devices that deal with his theme of choice are just white noise for the reviewer.



Ms. Cisar, your review reads like you've seen only one of his previous films so you can't place S.O.P. in the larger context of Morris' oeuvre. Plus you sound dumbfounded at stylistic elements that the director has been employing for years. Come on! The Thin Blue Line came out in 1988 and all you can muster is that Morris "apparently" likes reenactments?! He's used the Interrotron since 1997 when he debuted it in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which is where you should turn if you want portraits by Morris of people's inner psychology.

I've been impressed with some of Ms. Cisar's recent work but this is highly disappointing. Without taking the time to consider what Morris does, it's little more than an extended complaint that the director doesn't conform to convention.