One of the subgenres ushered in by the streaming era is the celebrity documentary. It’s not that they didn’t exist previously, but the number of celebrity documentaries pumped out by streaming platforms over the past several years — usually made at the behest of (or at least, with the cooperation of) the subjects themselves — have a way of turning these projects into exercises in image management, stripped of anything too complicated or unexpected.
Of the handful that have premiered just this month, only one — Apple’s examination of filmmaker Martin Scorsese — approaches anything close to absorbing. Let’s look at some of the others first.
Amazon’s “John Candy: I Like Me” comes from the actor Colin Hanks, who has a sincere appreciation for Candy the actor and the person. That’s fine, though this kind of sentiment can tip over into something closer to admiration and hamstring a documentarian’s instincts. Candy died in 1994 at the age of 43 and obviously isn’t around to collaborate on the film, but any hopes that this would give Hanks more freedom are quickly dashed. It’s as probing as A&E’s “Biography” (which is apparently still churning out new episodes), hitting all the pertinent details with its compendium of interview and archival clips, but rarely offering meaningful insight.
The three-part docuseries “Victoria Beckham,” arriving on the heels of her husband David Beckham’s 2023 docuseries, is the equivalent of Netflix ordering up “his & hers” towels for its celebrity documentary division. The self-interest is overt; both projects are produced by David Beckham’s company Studio 99.
Notably, the project doesn’t tackle the reports of David Beckham’s infidelities and how this affected her experiences, her outlook, her choices. When asked by Variety about this omission, director Nadia Hallgren gives a word salad of an answer that includes this explanation: “Part of it was like, well, we don’t want to tell those stories.”
Directors make these kinds of choices all the time. Documentaries aren’t journalism. Nor are they exhaustive encyclopedia entries. No one is required to bare their soul for the camera. But this choice seems designed to adhere to the dictates of a marketing plan.
“Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” on Apple centers on the husband-and-wife comedy duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. It’s made by their son, Ben Stiller, whose level of fame has eclipsed that of his parents. Maybe that’s an impediment; when his sister says how difficult it was to see his star rise while she struggled, he goes silent. His response is the same when his now-adult children say his Hollywood aspirations have affected their relationships with him.
As Stiller and Meara’s son, he’s perhaps also too close to his chosen subject matter to craft a film that could tell us something deeper about his parents’ comedy of friction in public, which had parallels to their dynamic in private. “I don’t know where the act ends and the marriage begins,” Meara says in an old interview, and it’s an intriguing throughline, but also one that isn’t further developed. Instead, what emerges is Stiller’s preoccupation with repeating the mistakes of his parents. There’s a sincerity in acknowledging this, but ultimately it’s a limited observation.
Though the film includes reels and reels of home movies and audio tapes (apparently Jerry Stiller liked to record everything), the grainy footage becomes repetitive and, counterintuitively, doesn’t offer an intimate window into the lives of this family. Stiller was Jewish and Meara was Irish Catholic, but you get the sense that the culture within the home they created together was defined by more by show business than anything else.
What’s most interesting about Stiller and Meara’s dynamic is their style of humor. Not just their cadence and pronunciation, but their blunt, direct approach. Nothing is couched in kinder terms. This is such a New York sensibility — ethnic New York — and it’s one that’s largely absent from pop culture at the moment.
Another product of New York gets the documentary treatment in Apple’s “Mr. Scorsese,” with its exhaustive look back at Martin Scorsese’s career, and to a lesser degree, his personal life. The director is Rebecca Miller, who calls the project a “film portrait” — that’s literally how it’s described in the opening credits — which is worthy of an eyeroll. But to her credit, she does create an actual portrait of her subject, and one that’s often absorbing.
Even so, Miller’s thoughtful efforts are perhaps too tentative at times, avoiding tougher scrutiny. A documentarian doesn’t need to be antagonistic to be effective, but a sharply thrown elbow or two isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re trying to shake someone from personal lore they’ve settled on. That may not have been Miller’s goal, but it’s the kind of energy that’s conspicuously missing from (and needed in) the five-part docuseries.
Scorsese is interviewed at length and he’s a good talker. A detailed talker. Quick to laugh. He’s likable! You come away with a better understanding of his films and the different periods he was working in. But there’s no sense of discovery when he responds to Miller’s questions; you get the sense these are stories he’s told himself, about himself, for a very long time. It’s all very friendly. He’s not challenged on anything. Neither is the viewer.
Even so, “Mr. Scorsese” is often rich viewing. Scorsese’s self-conception is that of the outsider who was never part of Hollywood’s favored circles, a sentiment that is perhaps somewhat disconnected from reality. Like anyone, he has faced challenges, both personally and professionally. But despite it all, he continually had opportunities to work. Someone was always there to fund his films, resulting in a new movie out every two or three years. This is not the trajectory of an underdog! But you sense an edge of “I had to fight for everything” in the stories he tells, and looking back, he’s not able to put some of that in perspective, knowing what he surely knows about the career prospects for filmmakers who aren’t white men.
The series captures a vivid sense of his preoccupations and interests, shaped by the lower Manhattan neighborhood of Sicilian immigrants where he grew up. “Violence was imminent.” (There’s a funny observation from a childhood friend who talks about Scorsese’s short time in the seminary: “Him being a priest, that woulda been nice I guess, but I never saw that finishing.” His glasses are perched halfway down his nose so that he’s looking over the top of the frames. “He had a heavy eye for the ladies.”)
Scorsese’s vices included a period of addiction that he discusses with an emotional distance. It’s unclear if that’s by design, or an unconscious protective function of his personality. Cocaine was his drug of choice and he suggests it offered an escape from a sense of failure around his broken marriages, the daughters he wasn’t raising, creative inspiration that had gone dry. It’s conspicuous that when Steven Spielberg talks about a frenzied sequence in “Goodfellas” where cocaine plays a prominent role — “Most movies have four gears; Marty has 14 gears in ‘Goodfellas,’ it just keeps shifting higher and higher and higher” — he makes no connection to Scorsese’s own understanding of cocaine, and how that was being translated to the screen. But then, Scorsese doesn’t make the connection, either.
Feeling trapped — by a physical place, or by compulsions, expectations, insecurities and frustrations — is a subject he returns to again and again. Rage is another, but Scorsese’s chatty public persona is at odds with his own rage that he says was — and perhaps still is — roiling just beneath the surface. What’s the source of that?
Only Isabella Rossellini, to whom he was once married, talks about this aspect of his personality with thoughtful, probing insight. He never hit her, but he could demolish a room. She says this with zero rancor, a smile almost playing at her lips. In hindsight, you sense, it all seems so absurd. The “violence from this minuscule body, asthmatic — it was like a volcano, it was terrifying.” But she has a theory about it: “This rage was part of the fuel to give him courage, because, you know, he was this little boy from Little Italy, and now was this big director who had to direct big films with a big budget.”
He describes the violence of his films as true — things he’s witnessed, as opposed to a reflection of his own inner conflicts. Nor does not talk about how, or even if, being small and asthmatic might have affected his confidence and experiences growing up, where machismo was the lingua franca. You pick up clues through other conversations, though. “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader describes the film as an expression of male isolation, loneliness, pent-up anger and displacement. Scorsese says the Travis Bickles of the world are “humiliated by people,” which is what sets them off. The idea that it’s other people’s fault? It’s interesting that he phrases it this way, even all these years later.
You keep waiting for him to reflect on abandoning his oldest children. The documentary is mostly focused on his creative output, but he also created these two human beings and apparently didn’t feel compelled to be part of their childhoods. He’s hardly the first. But it would have been interesting to hear his thoughts in hindsight. One of his daughters talks about feeling most connected to him — most cared for and doted on and part of his inner circle — not during a private family moment, but when she was an actor in “Age of Innocence.”
What keeps Scorsese up at night? Who does he see when he looks in the mirror, besides the underdog? Those are questions left unaddressed in the docuseries. But perhaps some of the answers were always there in his movies.