The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘American Movie’ (1999)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video and Roku. Rent it on Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
It’s not always easy to tell whether Chris Smith’s documentary exploits or celebrates Mark Borchardt, an extreme-D.I.Y. filmmaker from Milwaukee with an irrepressible drive to complete “Coven,” his roughly half-hour horror movie. Borchardt does a pretty good job of being a parody of himself. As one of his brothers says, “His main asset is really just his mouth.” Despite its title, “American Movie” is less a dispatch from the busy 1990s indie-film scene than a portrait of a big dreamer on its fringes. Quixotism is not limited to any profession.
Part of the documentary’s appeal comes from Borchardt’s natural — and possibly unconscious — way with one-liners, all of which are much better than the dialogue in his script. He is not fazed by a threat of seizure from the I.R.S. (“Luckily it’s just $81. What are they going to take, you know, like my ‘Night of the Living Dead’ book?”) His motivational quips have a crystalline purity. (“No one has ever, ever paid admission to see an excuse.”) According to his father, he has a special gift for getting a normally tightfisted uncle, Bill, to part with his money; it becomes a running joke that Bill, who is clearly no longer all there (and whose death, sadly, is noted at the end of the film), will get credit on “Coven” as an executive producer. There is also no on-set obstacle that can’t be powered through. After repeatedly trying to ram an actor’s head through a wooden kitchen cabinet, Borchardt punches the cabinet and realizes it’s quite sturdy. “I’m sorry I tried to put your head in this,” he says, a significant understatement.
Borchardt isn’t the only treasurable character here: The documentary clearly loves Mike Schank, Borchardt’s devoted and deadpan friend, who delivers a gaspingly funny monologue about a near-death experience that found him waking up from a drug trip in a hospital, where his mother then thwarted his plan to drop acid on the spot. There’s also a sad undercurrent to the film, especially in the second half, as Borchardt takes part in a notably glum Thanksgiving, experiences family troubles and confronts his own fears and doubts about the project. You have to wonder how he felt about having other filmmakers — Smith did his own cinematography, and Sarah Price, who produced with him, did the sound — train their camera on his efforts to become, in effect, one of them. But when applause breaks out after the premiere screening of “Coven,” “American Movie” hints that maybe — maybe — Borchardt’s story is every filmmaker’s.
‘The Queen of Versailles’ (2012)
In 2012, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary — newly adapted into a stage musical — prompted a powerful sense of schadenfreude. It centers on a comically profligate central couple, Jackie and David Siegel, who had started to build a 90,000-square-foot home outside Orlando modeled after Versailles. But the 2008 financial crisis threw a wrench in their plans, turning them into a kind of mirror image of countless Americans who had signed on for mortgages they couldn’t afford. David, the chief executive of the timeshare company Westgate Resorts, had made his fortune essentially roping people into debatable real-estate investments. (“We do 100 percent of our sales on the first day,” his son Richard says early on, in an explanation of how the company closes deals with prospective customers — “mooches,” he calls them, acknowledging that it’s an unflattering word.) But by half an hour into the documentary, David is stuck with an incomplete Charles Foster Kane mansion that he can’t unload. Who would spend $100 million on a partly built monument to sheer tackiness? “Even the ones that have money, Orlando would have to be the place they want to be,” says Cliff Wright, a limo driver in the movie.
Revisited a dozen years later, “The Queen of Versailles” plays a little less like the fish-in-a-barrel comedy it seemed to be then. It’s a bit easier to have sympathy for Jackie, who, despite her Jennifer Coolidge-like obliviousness (e.g., asking the man at the Hertz desk what her driver’s name is), retains at least one friendship from her modest origins in Binghamton, N.Y. She also begins to like that her husband, who we’ve previously seen take credit for delivering George W. Bush the presidency, has been humbled by their change of fortune. The death in 2015 of one of their daughters from a drug overdose tempers the laughs as well. Even the ultrawealthy weren’t spared from the opioid crisis.
But “The Queen of Versailles” remains an engaging treatise on the psychological distortions of wealth. In some ways, the film’s most interesting character is a peripheral one, Jonquil, born to a relative of Jackie’s but raised as a daughter by the Siegels. She says she has experienced being both “dirt poor” and “filthy rich” and speaks of how her perspective has changed — and not. “It’s like you don’t have to really worry about money, but at the same time, you do,” she says.
‘American Symphony’ (2023)
Matthew Heineman’s documentary shares its title with a composition by the musician Jon Batiste. But despite Batiste’s grand ambitions for the piece, and his desire to shift perceptions of spaces in which classical music is performed, the movie isn’t simply a chronicle of how Batiste went about preparing for the premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2022.
At the same time Batiste was pursuing his vision, his partner, the writer Suleika Jaouad, who became his wife during the course of filming, received a bone-marrow transplant after a recurrence of cancer. Her illness, as Batiste composed and traveled, led to their living what Jaouad calls a “life of contrasts.” (From 2012 to 2015, she wrote about her experiences with cancer for The New York Times.) That balancing act — between personal and professional obligations, between the intimacy of hospital rooms and the pressures of concert halls and Grammys fans — becomes the film’s subject.
It’s a balance that Heineman pays attention to in the film’s presentation as well as in its content. When Batiste dedicates the last song at a performance to Jaouad, the director holds on the long pause that the musician takes before his fingers touch the piano keys. “We both see survival as its own kind of creative act,” Jaouad says early in the movie. “It’s what helps us alchemize the different things that come up in life and transform them into something useful and meaningful and even beautiful.” And despite the heavy subject matter, “American Symphony” isn’t depressing. It’s closer to a prescription for living: The way these two artists confront challenges together could be described as a form of harmony.
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