Beyond the Multiplex

"Protagonist" I'm not sure how I can sell you on Jessica Yu's documentary "Protagonist" without employing a whole string of adjectives and without making it sound either hopelessly pretentious or New Agey or both. Well, the fact is that Yu's film about four totally unrelated men and their struggles toward some version of responsibility and maturity is kind of pretentious, and is preoccupied with issues of selfhood one could certainly associate with New Age philosophy. It's also a highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood I've ever seen.

Actually, Yu (director of the equally fascinating "In the Realms of the Unreal," about outsider artist Henry Darger) was originally commissioned to make a film about the Greek playwright Euripides, of all subjects. So her interviews with her four male subjects are intercut with excerpts from Euripidean drama, performed by wooden-rod puppets modeled after Greek masks, and chapter headings drawn from Euripides' texts. Whether this high-concept frame really works is open to debate, but it does create a sense that these four men -- a martial-arts expert, a former bank robber, an ex-"ex-gay" minister and a reformed left-wing terrorist -- take part in a struggle that long predates the 21st-century crisis of masculinity.

All of Yu's subjects are men whose lives have involved key moments of revelation and transformation, which could be described as central themes in Euripides. In some sense, each was at war with his true nature (or with fate, as the Greeks would say). Joe Loya grew up in an abusive Mexican-American family and became an especially sadistic bank robber, a path he now looks back on with remarkable clarity. As we see in if-you-don't-laugh-you'll-cry file footage, Mark Pierpont fought for years to repress his homosexual impulses, becoming a prominent figure in the evangelical movement's attempts to "cure" lesbians and gays. Hans-Joachim Klein rebelled against his father, a Nazi sympathizer, by becoming just as dogmatic in another direction, as one of Europe's most notorious left-wing revolutionaries of the 1970s. (To those who don't know much about the leftist-terror wave of that decade -- which is to say almost everyone -- Klein's story will seem especially strange and dramatic.)

In some respects the odd man out is Mark Salzman, Yu's husband (and a respected author in his own right), who perhaps is in the film to demonstrate that less dramatic lives contain these kinds of heroic transformations. Salzman never pistol-whipped a bank teller or hijacked an airplane, but in his account he spent years in the thrall of a cruel and small-minded martial-arts guru before leaving to strike his own path. Whether Yu can connect these four guys to Euripides in some meaningful way I'm not sure, but her film makes an oddly resonant and perhaps even liberating experience for men, and perhaps especially for women who are curious about them. (Opens Nov. 30 at the IFC Center in New York; Dec. 7 in Boston, San Francisco and Washington; and Dec. 14 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.)

"Oswald's Ghost" Does the world really need another film about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened almost exactly 44 years ago in Dallas? I suppose the marketplace will make its own decision about that, but after dragging myself to see British filmmaker Robert Stone's "Oswald's Ghost" (no, he is not Robert Stone the acclaimed American novelist) I'll offer a qualified yes. Stone makes no effort to resolve the semi-unsolved crime, although he does lean strongly in a predictable direction. Rather, "Oswald's Ghost" is a thorough and systematic primer on how and why the JFK assassination became a generational obsession, and seemed to signal the demolition of at least one version of the American dream.

Given that well over half of all Americans are too young to remember the event, this seems like a worthy cause, and Stone (director of a previous documentary about another generation-defining event, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst) handles it judiciously. He gives plenty of time to more reputable conspiracy buffs, like attorney Mark Lane and private investigator Josiah Thompson, while illustrating capably that New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, portrayed heroically in Oliver Stone's "JFK," was a homophobic crackpot who poisoned all attempts to make sense of the case with his fanciful and paranoid theories.

Ultimately, Robert Stone clearly agrees with the late Norman Mailer (extensively interviewed here) that while it's tempting to discern larger operations of history in the JFK killing -- and one cannot conclusively rule out a conspiracy -- Occam's razor leads us back to one tormented individual in the end. But Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt or innocence or accomplices are not the point of the film; Stone is more interested in the fact that much about the Kennedy murder is now so shrouded in myth and mystification as to be permanently unknowable, and that that fact alone has gnawed away at the self-confidence of middle-class white America ever since. (Opens Nov. 30 at Cinema Village in New York, with DVD release and PBS broadcast to follow.)

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