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How Documentaries Saved My Love of Movies
Keeping it reel in Hollywood
by Greg Coyle

I can tell you the exact day I fell out of love with movies. It was January 11, 2002. I had just left the theater after seeing Terry Zwigoff’s "Ghost World." For those who’ve not seen the picture, it details the aimless, existential wanderings of a pair of high school girlfriends as they attempt, albeit feebly, to escape the airless atmosphere of their suburban neighborhood. It was, in other words, a movie I should’ve loved.

As with any other sort of relationship that’s fallen on bad times, I did not realize my love of movies was gone until it was too late. Imagine the creeping dread when, upon counting backward, I discovered that "Ghost World" was only the latest in a string of indifferent encounters. I found I could make a list of movies that, either widely heralded by critics or highly recommended by people I trusted, left me as cool as a plate of baba ganooj. "Gladiator," "Sixth Sense," "Almost Famous," "Memento," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Man Who Wasn’t There" — none elicited much more than a somnolent "Eh."

Breaking up Is Hard to Do
So what had happened? Was it me? Had I failed in some pivotal way to maintain my part of the creative union? Or were movies at fault? Had there, in fact, been a general decline in the quality and veracity of films? One never knows whom to blame when a relationship comes to an end. I was inclined to point the finger at movies, but knew on reflection I also bore some responsibility for the undoing.

My part was related to the attitude of cool, emotional distance I had begun to bring to movies. After 30 years of watching them, I’d become jaded and overly demanding, inching the emotional and fictive requirements ever higher until, like a junkie, I was hopelessly chasing the feeling I got seeing "Apocalypse Now" for the first time.

Meanwhile, the movies had their own failings. They’d become guilty of championing style over truth, cleverness over honesty. There was no heart in them and no sense of that mystery that, so much a part of living, distinguishes the very best films. Too many things had started to get in the way: the multimillion-dollar budgets; the special effects; the all-too-public actors; the rehashed, trite and/or self-consciously tricky stories; demographics; public relations blitzes; and the influence of first-weekend numbers and current trends. There was more real life in the box of Goobers I ate than in the movies themselves.

Movies and I began a trial separation. I packed up my stuff and moved into an apartment in the city.

Enter the Savior
These things happen. People grow apart. One of us, me or the film industry, had stood still while the other gamboled off in another direction. Before we knew it, we no longer had anything in common.

Then, just when things seemed bleakest, at just that moment I’d accepted that my life had changed for good, I rounded a corner and collided with George Butler’s "The Endurance: Shackelton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition." Much as the lover cannot say why he chose that day to walk in the park, I have no idea what took me into the theater that afternoon. What I do know is I walked out enraptured, in love with that movie, and soon, totally incapacitated by a new romance with documentaries.

In Butler’s movie, and in the grainy daguerreotypes and stilted reels of Shackelton’s on-board photographer, Frank Hurley, I found the realism I had been missing. Gone were the artifice and the self-consciousness. In its place resided a simple, honest, unadulterated accounting of what it meant to be human. How can people survive over a year shipwrecked in icy Antarctica? How can a single man, empowered by the same stuff that resides within me, engineer the rescue of his crew when every day is a test of survival? I left the theater not only moved by the film, but changed as a person.

After "The Endurance," I devoured all the documentaries I could get my hands on. The feeling was different but no less powerful than when first seeing "Wings of Desire," say, or "The Graduate." I can now confidently rank movies like "The Endurance," "Welcome to Death Row," "When We Were Kings," "Grey Gardens," "Harlan County USA," "American Dream," "Paradise Lost," "Brother’s Keeper," among many others, in that list of the finest stories ever told on film.

Let’s hope it’s just an artistic cul-de-sac from which we’ll soon depart, but most movies today are no more real than the butter splashed on the popcorn we eat while watching them. Documentaries, quiet, underfunded and largely overlooked, capture, without the distraction of celebrity or escalating special effects demands, something of what it means to be alive. As I’ve not got that figured out yet, I’m thankful to have these filmmakers helping me ask the question.