Morris, Errol

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    ‘Separated’ Review: Interrogating a Policy

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    The latest documentary from Errol Morris looks at the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border.When the great documentarian Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) has taken on overtly political subjects, he has rarely approached them from a position of express advocacy. His perspective tends to be more philosophical, even cosmic.“American Dharma” (2019) sought to understand what made the former Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon tick. “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) revolved around the photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and how acts that might look so obviously like torture were in certain cases rationalized as routine. The director’s portraits of former defense secretaries — Robert S. McNamara in “The Fog of War” (2003) and Donald H. Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” (2014) — centered on figures who were well out of office, even if, in 2003, McNamara’s reflections on the Vietnam War held up a clear mirror to Rumsfeld and his then-current approach to Iraq.Morris’s “Separated,” on the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border, comes closer to a direct intervention. The filmmaker has been open about his desire to have it released before the presidential election, and although it is now playing in theaters, it isn’t set to air on MSNBC until Dec. 7, when its relevance will be reduced. “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election?” Morris wrote on X. “It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”If “Separated” is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity. In the film, Jonathan White, who worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services when family separations began, speaks of a period in 2017 when those actions flew under the public’s radar. “It happened for months before there was any policy to do it,” he says, “and it was going on while my own leadership maintained it wasn’t.”At the Venice Film Festival, Morris highlighted the contradiction: “If the purpose was deterrence, why do it covertly?” he said in August. (There is a hint of Peter Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove in that idea: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret.”) But White says that “harm to children was part of the point.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ Review: Thinker, Player, Searcher, Spy

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      Two master performers, the filmmaker Errol Morris and the writer John le Carré, circle the truth in this mesmerizing biographical documentary.When a onetime private detective sits down to question a former spy and confessed performance artist, you might expect some verbal fisticuffs, a bit of bobbing and weaving or defensive prickliness. And when the interlocutor is the filmmaker Errol Morris and his subject is David Cornwell, a.k.a the sublime fabulist John le Carré (who died in 2020), those expectations only intensify.Yet “The Pigeon Tunnel,” a four-day conversation Morris recorded in 2019 (and adapted from Cornwell’s 2016 memoir of the same name) is nothing if not smooth, Cornwell’s sentences as creamy and cunning on the tongue as on the page. Polished, urbane and preternaturally prepared, Cornwell’s sometimes mischievous demeanor forms a kind of shadow narrative, a fascinating carapace that Morris’s interrogatory arrows fail to fully pierce. This drains the film of spontaneity, but pumps it full of a strangely satisfying intrigue: Who is playing whom?Morris is a master exploiter of this kind of duality, and he sounds positively gleeful here. Returning repeatedly to the notions of deception, betrayal and performance — the movie’s three philosophical pillars — he coaxes Cornwell through his spectacularly unsettled childhood to his career as a young operative in the British Secret Service. A gift for artifice emerged early as he learned to emulate his upper-crust schoolmates and a social class to which he did not belong. Espionage came easily after that, his Cold War adventures spurring deep reflections on the nature of duplicity (the infamous double agent Kim Philby, he believes, was addicted to it) and fuel for the novels he would later write.Looming over every anecdote, though, is the formidable shadow of Cornwell’s father, Ronald, a grandly unapologetic swindler and the film’s original deceiver.“I can see my life as a succession of embraces and escapes,” Cornwell says at one point. And while he managed to avoid embracing Ronald’s final, heartless scam — perhaps the most tragic of the film’s many betrayals — it’s clear that he never fully freed himself from his father’s larcenous influence.Much of this will already be known to those familiar with Cornwell’s memoir, his previous interviews or Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography. But even if you have never read a le Carré novel — or seen one of the many movies based on them — “The Pigeon Tunnel” will delight the curious. Cornwell might disappointingly refuse to discuss his reportedly colorful sex life, but he seems more than willing to bare psychological wounds. Of particular poignancy is his fear that human beings have no center, that what he calls our “inmost room” is empty and the things we seek mere chimeras.Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator. And though Morris’s dramatization of the titular event — Cornwell’s boyhood memory of a horrifying hunting trip — offers a delightful visual metaphor for Morris’s interviewing style, his other re-enactments are unnecessary: Surrender to Cornwell’s eloquence and the images create themselves. Exactly how many of them are inventions perhaps even he couldn’t have said for sure.The Pigeon TunnelRated PG-13 for wrecked birds and resolute smokers. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      Errol Morris Did Not Like This Q&A About His le Carré Film

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      John le Carré’s spy novels traffic in the philosophical, emotional and practical ambiguities complicating concepts like truth, deceit and self-awareness. Which makes their author, who died in 2020 at 89 and whose real name was David Cornwell, an ideal foil for the legendary documentary director Errol Morris, himself an artist compelled toward questions about those […] More

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      ‘Enemies of the State’ Review: Seeking Proof Shrouded in Shadows

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      This documentary on the strange case of Matt DeHart weaves uncertainty into its structure.Was Matt DeHart an Air National Guard veteran who, having spent time in hacktivist circles, stumbled on information so explosive that the F.B.I. had him physically tortured during an interrogation process? (That’s what he claimed when he fled to Canada after 2013.) Or was he a fugitive from justifiable charges of producing and transporting child pornography, a case he suggested had been concocted?Journalists who have covered the DeHart saga — and the summary above is only the tip of the iceberg — have tended to note when corroboration becomes impossible. The remarkable thing about “Enemies of the State,” a documentary directed by Sonia Kennebeck and executive produced by Errol Morris, no stranger to epistemological mysteries — is that it comes close to offering decisive yes and no answers, with evidence to back them up.It becomes a documentary about re-evaluating biases, a process that may well implicate the filmmakers. As Tor Ekeland, a lawyer who represented DeHart, says in the movie, “The only way to make the facts in this case make sense is to entertain some kind of wild conspiracy theory.” Kennebeck must have recognized the danger of doing just that. Matt’s parents, Paul and Leann, featured extensively, appear to have reached a point where no amount of paranoia would be unjustified, yet they seem utterly convinced of themselves. Even the third parties interviewed — the National Post journalist Adrian Humphreys, the McGill professor Gabriella Coleman — wind up confronting blind spots.Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.Enemies of the StateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘My Psychedelic Love Story’ Review: On the Run With Timothy Leary

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      To induce dread in a paranoiac, one need only invoke two acronyms: C.I.A. and LSD Along with a third and a fourth — U.F.O. and J.F.K. — these were key ingredients in the alphabet soup of conspiracy theory for more than half a century.But. You don’t have to be a paranoiac, because sometimes dread-inducing combinations and schemes do yield horrific results. The 2017 Errol Morris-directed mini-series, “Wormwood,” to which “My Psychedelic Love Story” is a sequel of sorts, went into detail about the C.I.A. and LSD. It showed that the cloak-and-dagger organization and the hallucinogenic drug met up earlier than most might have guessed.The agency’s early experimentation with acid culminated in 1952 with the tragic, infuriating death of the C.I.A.-employed scientist Frank Olson, officially deemed a suicide. “Wormwood” mixed Morris’s astute documentary style — a blend of acute interviews, archival footage and graphics — with dramatic re-enactments to suggest that it might have been murder.[embedded content]The mini-series caught the attention of Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who in the early ’70s was the consort and psychic soul mate of Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor turned LSD Johnny Appleseed. Harcourt-Smith was in Afghanistan with Leary, who had escaped from prison in the United States, when he was returned to U.S. custody.At a subsequent rally for Leary, the poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, in a piece called “44 Questions About Timothy Leary,” asked, with not a little anger, whether Harcourt-Smith was a “C.I.A. sex provocateur” who entrapped Leary.Harcourt-Smith’s question for Morris is: “Was I?”“My Psychedelic Love Story” also draws on her 2013 memoir “Tripping the Bardo With Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story.” The narrative Morris and Harcourt-Smith recount is rollicking, globe-trotting and packed with characters, including the shady Hungarian banker Arpad Plesch — who managed to make himself Harcourt-Smith’s step-grandfather and stepfather — and the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Implausible but nevertheless actual names such as Donald Strange are dropped. If you ever wondered, “How does Thomas Pynchon come up with that stuff?” this movie will assure you that the world just hands a lot of it to him.Throughout the movie, Harcourt-Smith, a handsome woman sitting comfortably on an aqua love seat in an airy, earth-toned living room, recounts tales of free love interspersed with recollections of childhood sexual abuse. She likens herself to Mata Hari (and Morris frequently intercuts Greta Garbo, in a 1931 film, vamping it up as the famous spy). She shares wisdom from her bohemian upbringing with observations such as “You can never tell how rich rich people are.”Morris asks her point blank, “When did you first realize you could control men?” and she takes the question at face value. But her story reveals that idea of control, as Morris frames it, is a false one.It is true, though, that for a long period Leary was in thrall to Harcourt-Smith, and that Harcourt-Smith worshiped him. This heady, fascinating movie never definitively establishes that she was manipulated to get Leary back into the United States, where he eventually became an informant.And as is the case so many times in life, the relationship between Leary and Harcourt-Smith ended, after all the convolutions and mystifications, not with a bang or even a whimper, but a simple betrayal. One night, while living in witness protection in Santa Fe, N.M. (“I wasn’t used to camping,” Harcourt-Smith says of their raw living quarters; “I was a Parisian!”) the couple had a loud argument. The next morning Leary was gone from the house, and from her life forever.My Psychedelic Love StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms beginning Nov. 29. More