Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

My small survey of documentary types has brought me to this, and what a celebration!

This is complex, meaningful cinema that just happens to be a documentary. It is intelligent, complex, deliberate and deeply thought provoking. I think it communicates something that isn't quite right, but the thing is communicated in the most effective way — by folding the idea being explained into the form of the explanation, the film itself.

The core of this is the work of Rodney Brooks. He is a celebrated researcher in robotics and now the founder of the most promising company making these things. He is smart, articulate and the things he makes work as advertised. I've encountered him and his work professionally over the last 30 years. He makes machines that walk, and have some cognitive navigation skills. Walking is hard.

While there are many research centers working on robotics, there are only two universities working on the underlying theories. MIT is the least shallow of these. Add in the fact that Brooks has manufactured thousands of graduates in his style of thinking, and you may appreciate why he may be one of the most influential thinkers on the planet.

The theory here is that instead of thinking about a single brain, it makes sense to think in terms of a society of collaborating miniminds, agents. As a metaphor, bees, ants, termites are usual. And as usual, the metaphor in most quarters is taken too literally. Brooks does not quite do so, but this is the first compromise made by the filmmaker. Making agents systems that have the behavior you want is impossible without some structure in the society. A promising approach is to go deep and restructure logic. Instead, Brooks structures the agents into "subsumptive" layers. This mirrors special purpose roles of termites and molerats in colonies.

Okay, here is an idea, an interesting one, and one that is already embedded in the general intellectual economy. Around this, Morris builds a film. Nominally, there are four "geniuses." One is our robotics theorist. We have an obsessive expert in molerats, so we have our metaphor made whole. We have a lion tamer. Now he fits into the idea architecture by explaining how he repeatedly risks his life to figure out and superficially control inscrutable animals. And finally we have a guy who reverses the metaphor; he takes living things with their natural agent system that wants to behave one way, and he forces it to look like larger living things. The resemblance is superficial and fragile.

Two of these form the cinematic spine: the circus and the robots. Most of what we see apart from the four individuals themselves is a collage of circus footage and splices from old robot movies. We also have the synthesis of old "circus" movies with robotic influence.

Peppered in are the two other guys and their cinematic expression. With the molerats, we have — well film of molerats. With the topiarist, we have some artistically photographed scenes of him working in the garden. The score is important in Morris films; here the composer tries to build subsumptive music, taking themes from movies and other recognizable sources, assigning them to types of clips we see, and subsuming them into a klezmer- inspired circus score where we are the audience.

This really is a carefully structured piece of cinema, visually conveying ideas much deeper than one normally allows.

The problem is that like the four men we are shown, the approach is still discrete, reductionist. It assumes that great sweeps of life can be logical, explained. We go to the circus and topiary garden to see this narrative. An influential professor treats grad students like so many ants, incrementally evolving "the system." A fellow "explains" the colony, as if observations equals insights.

So here is the quandary with film and ideas. Film is about showing. The best ideas are about abstracting away distracting (and often false) appearances. A long form narrative film takes you places where you can invent your insights, with some guidance. A documentary feeds insights, but has to stick more with the "sight" than the "in."

Still, the structure here and the ambition! It isn't real, but it does not have to be to warm us.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I was amazed at how Errol Morris abstractly tied together four people with such contrasting occupations. I was skeptical before seeing the film--after all, how on earth would anyone relate a lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole rat specialist and robot expert--but Morris pulls it off excellently. The ties between certain details of each interview either tie visually or conceptually with one of the other interviewees, and the beauty is in the way the ideas are strung together. The quirky soundtrack is fantastic, giving a twist to circus music that carries the mood of the film, as well as help Morris to make serious comments about life. At any rate, this is a very enjoyable documentary, even to those who strongly dislike documentaries.

This was easily the best film of 1997.

Morris has tried it all; one camera documentary, for Gates of Heaven; Rashomon tinged storytelling, with The Thin Blue Line; and now, finally, the beautiful and moving Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

In the earlier films, the viewer's left with the task of sifting through lots of unedited information to put together his own story from what's been gathered, rather like Ed Wood going through rolls of archival footage to see if there's a movie there. In this one, Morris had a story to tell, and he goes after it with aplomb and purpose. His camera angles are ingenious, his use of slow motion masterful, and the story--that the personality traits that lead to success are the same, regardless of the stripe of the pursuit--comes along gently. Once the connection's been made, he overlaps the voice of one participant over the work of another, and the resonances between all of them become more and more apparent.

Watching Morris come along as a filmmaker is a little like watching a favorite cousin come of age. This movie makes you want to cheer, not only for Morris, but for the cast of misfits he's put on film who've taken their lives and made something of them. These four men are workers. They're not managers, not victims of dumb luck. They're doing these jobs because they love them, and because they love them and work without pause, they've become successful. They're not geniuses. Like Morris, they've merely managed to focus. Morris shows us what a rare thing that is. Bravo.

Don't believe the folks who say this film is about the thin line between genius and madness. That may be part of it, but it's far from what's important here. The real loot here is FC&OOC's exploration of the "other", and our attempts to understand, shape and control it. Humans have a fascination with the nature of life and intelligence--whether it comes in the form of wild animals, plants in a garden or robots developing in a lab--and the ways we approach these things reveal as much about subject as object. This film does a beautiful job of highlighting the mystery inherent in living and/or intelligent things, evoking the awe we feel when we regard them, and the questions that arise when we attempt to study, cultivate, contain or "tame" them.

Four men are interviewed separately. One man studies hairless mole rats. One man is a topiary gardener. One man is a retired lion tamer. One is a robotics designer. Each has a passion (or an obsession) with their chosen subject but have seemingly little in common. With the collection of their interviews, Errol Morris explores the themes of growth, development and evolution of species.

My plot summary suggests that I "got" what Morris was trying to do but really this is my guess. If that was his intension though then he has fallen short of it because rather than coming together to form a documentary, the film feels like it is all over the place with no real direction or control over the subject matter. Each of the men are reasonably interesting by themselves and the topics are unusual enough to hold the interest. However the way Morris uses them is poor and the film is cluttered with archive movie footage and a terrible musical score. I'm not totally sure how he was trying to get to where he wanted to be, maybe at one point he just decided to revel in the "weirdness" of his subjects and give up on pulling it all together.

The men are mostly interesting even if their subjects aren't particularly. The gardener was probably the only one that I actively found pretty dull, the others had a bit of character and passion that endeared them to me. Maybe if Morris had tried to do more with the men themselves he could have done something interesting, but by going for the bigger theme he loses his way and ultimately his film shows it consistently throughout.

Overall then a disappointing film from start to finish. Die-hard fans of Morris might find enough of his style and interest to carry them through but for me I found it to be a real mess of a documentary that doesn't seem to have any design or structure about and left me wondering what I was watching and why I was bothering.