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Subjectively awesome: Burstein & Morgen's The Kid Stays in the Picture

 Narrated by Robert Evans. Dir. Nanette Burstein&Brett Morgen, USA Films, 2002


"[I believe] there is no objective truth in life or in cinema... the only honest approach to film is the subjective experience." --Brett Morgen

How people feel about the above idea may well shape their reaction to Nanette Burstein&Brett Morgan's superb documentary about the career and life of producer/production chief Robert Evans. From the editorializing modifier it ought to be obvious I loved it.

A friend of mine, applying to med school, wrote an essay claiming to objectively prove Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON the best album of the rock era. All my protests that taste is inherently subjective fell on deaf ears. Only one school accepted him, but whether the essay played a part I don't know.

Taste is subjective because life is subjective, as Brett Morgen says. I experience life from inside my body and behind my eyes. I have no idea how others perceive me at any given moment, and I'm not sure asking them would produce a truthful answer. Most of us moderate our visceral reactions in our verbal statements. It's not the same as actually being the other person.

That's what I think, anyway, and that's the approach taken by producer/directors Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen's film. Evans narrates the movie, and only Evans. No talking heads, no voiceovers from writers or friends or outsiders of any sort. It's Bob Evans according to Bob Evans.

THE KID... begins at Evans' chance meeting with Norma Shearer, who picked him to play her real-life husband, Irving Thalberg, in the Lon Chaney biopic MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES, based on seeing him conduct business by phone poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, presenting his life in three distinct acts. Meteoric rise to power, fall from grace, and ultimate comeback. Through each, Evans tells his story in countless stories of Hollywoods Old & New, the stars who defined both, and the directors who drove him insane. He sounds almost like onetime rival Frank Sinatra, or a character out of hardboiled detective fiction. Women are broads and dames, Roman Polanski is "the Pollack," his language and delivery sound streetwise, alternating between confident rumble and Cagneyesque sneer. In their commentary, Burstein and Morgen both say most of his narration is affectation, a persona he created to sell a specific version of himself. That's almost a relief, as otherwise Evans often feels too colorful to be credible.

Frankly, I don't know how much I care about his credibility. While most of his stories more or less check out, they're the kinds of stories I binge on, and I've seldom minded a little mythmaking in a narrative. Yesterday was a stressful day. I came to THE KID in desperate need of distraction, escape, and anesthesia. A movie guy, fabulous Hollywood stories told well are my drug of choice. While I agree with Morgen's premise, the stories' veracity ran a distant second to my desire to get lost in his story.

Burstein and Morgen made that easy, like sinking into a pre-surgery demerol twilight, Evans's understanding of his life delivered with such assurance and wit it lulled me into a cinema high, the pain of the day erased, at least for for 93 minutes. The singular pov makes immersion in the story so total I never noticed all the ways they manipulate Evans and others's images, sometimes compensating for lack of better archival material, other times enhancing the narrative flow, increasing drama, adding to pathos. 

I cannot count the number of docs I've gone into, assured they "play like a feature film," only to leave thinking, "Yes, just like a feature, if you've never seen a feature film." Though I can think of few features, outside Robert Stigwood's disastrous Beatles-musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which use only voiceover narration, THE KID felt like a feature to me, a subjective world in which to get lost for awhile, not a disruptive slog through he-said-she-said strivings for objective truth.

At one point in the narration, Evans compares himself to Jay Gatsby, an apt-enough idea, which got me thinking how Evans's life both affirms and denies two of Scott Firzgerald's most famous quotes. "The rich are very different than you and me," he allegedly remarked once to Hemingway. Evans, who helped make already-rich men on the Board of Paramount Studios' parent company, Gulf+Western, into wealthy ones, found himself frozen out of the kind of profit participation his success merited, the new elite not about to admit the upstart into their society.

"American lives have no second acts," Fitzgerald also wrote, but Bob Evans's life had three. Even if we take his fall from power as the world's most unpleasant intermission, his restoration at Paramount and later success as producer of pictures like SLIVER and THE SAINT gives the lie to Fitzgerald's pessimism. If that last act feels bittersweet - none of his later hits had the cultural impact of LOVE STORY, THE GODFATHER, or CHINATOWN - it aligns with Evans's own hard-won wisdom. It ends a little like THE OUTSIDERS, the YA movie directed by his sparring partner Francis Coppola, with life more stable and secure, but the bigger future less certain than in the glory days. Which, like life, itself, feels objectively true.

Burstein and Morgen were right.



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