Ramin Bahrani’s first documentary feature profiles Richard Davis, the irrepressible inventor of a modern bulletproof vest.
In “2nd Chance” the director, Ramin Bahrani, introduces Richard Davis as the only man to have shot himself 192 times. The number is impressive and also excessive, which is one way of describing Davis, the jolly inventor of a modern bulletproof vest and a born salesman. Shooting himself repeatedly on tape, he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his vests, but what he was also doing was building a gonzo reputation too catchy to ignore or resist.
It worked — I started this review with his pitch — but, directing his first documentary feature, Bahrani doesn’t content himself with Davis’s self-mythologizing, or with debunking it, really. As he chronicles the amusement-park ride of Davis’s life — from pizzeria owner to multimillionaire entrepreneur, through divorces and lawsuits and accidental deaths — he describes something akin to a human perpetual motion machine, running on entrepreneurial passion, gun-nut melodrama, a habit of hokum, and greed on autopilot.
Davis’s prototype bulletproof vest arose out of a near-fatal 1969 shootout on a pizza delivery run, with three assailants. Typically enough, this encounter may not have happened as advertised, but in any case, Davis built up a successful new company, Second Chance, marketing to police departments with re-enactment-style promo films. Interviewed today in what looks like his den, he sits for Bahrani’s questioning looking like a relatively harmless uncle who can’t stop gabbing about his war stories.
But Davis has also had trouble with sticking to the facts when his business interests were in jeopardy. That happens most egregiously when a ballyhooed new vest model proves to be fatally ineffective at stopping bullets. This and other failings carry a personal sting in the telling here by former employees, partly because the Michigan-based Second Chance seemed to retain a surprisingly local feel. (It was also a family affair, employing Davis’s formidable grandfather, dutiful son, and an ex-wife, Karen. Another ex-wife, Kathleen, offers inside scoops and colorful commentary.)
Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions. The vest scandal was no career-buster: Davis, and his son, eventually regrouped and started a new company. Davis’s collaborators, on the other hand, can’t help but look back: we hear extensively from Aaron Westrick, an eager-beaver police officer who went to work for Davis’s company after a vest saved his life.
Despite Davis’s showmanship, Westrick might actually be the film’s most resonant figure — all the way up to and including a paradigm-shifting but somewhat overcooked reunion with Westrick’s assailant from decades ago. Westrick wants to believe in what Davis is selling, even as he is repeatedly disappointed — a loyalty to a myth that might have more to say about the country than Davis.
As a fiction filmmaker, Bahrani often returns to the theme of the American dream and its not-so-surprising fallacies (“Man Push Cart,” “99 Homes”). Davis’s go-for-broke spirit seems to repel analysis here, and his story can even sound comparatively tame against the Wild West backdrop of mainstream gun culture. But maybe Davis’s vaunted 192 shots say it best after all: they suggest someone both acting out a kind of immortality and demonstrating an unmistakable death wish.
2nd Chance
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
