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Framing John DeLorean (Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-06-25 00:41:41 +0000 UTC
Maybe critics and academics have gotten what we wanted, and now it's a Pyrrhic victory. After decades of decrying the God-like truth claims of standard, "transparent" documentary, we have achieved a glut of so-called hybrid docs that tell their story, expose the conditions of their own making, and even incorporate fictional elements, all to forcefully reveal the fact that things like history and truth are themselves fictions.
This results in an artifact like Framing John DeLorean, and yes, that title is a pun. After spending its first fifteen minutes or so exploring the fact that many Hollywood films were being planned about DeLorean but none ever came to fruition, Framing blends file footage and interviews with staged re-enactments and speculative fictional scenes staring Alec Baldwin as DeLorean. The result feels sluggish, much like a vehicle that lacks the necessary pick-up to keep pace on the highway.
The fiction scenes feel amateurish, and the documentary material often provides equal weight to aspects of DeLorean's life and career that really aren't of equal interest. Or to put it another way: I wanted to know more about the cars, the design, and the Northern Ireland deal, but Argott and Joyce really wanted to spend much of their time on the cocaine and embezzlement trials, because they assume that's what a general viewer cares about. So really, this is a film that ends up being all things to no people. And, it's whacking you over the head constantly to remind you how theoretically "correct" it is. All flash, no workmanship.
