Medium Cool (1969, Haskell Wexler) (Patreon)

67/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Misremembered it as mostly taking place during the '68 DNC, when in fact that's just the last 20 minutes or so. And while watching Verna Bloom wander through history in that bright yellow dress remains electrifying, I'd forgotten that Eileen is searching for her son, which now strikes me as a curiously bland intersection of the personal and the political (especially in this context). It would be no less visually powerful, I submit, had she dropped her car keys somewhere in Grant Park and been looking for those; "missing child" lends her quest more urgency, but not in any way that dovetails with the demonstrations and police violence. (The same is true, on a larger scale, of Cassellis' relationship with Eileen and Harold as juxtaposed with his work as a cameraman. The former influences the latter only by inference, i.e. the film otherwise makes little sense. There's no actual exploration of why getting close to these two people would make Cassellis feel indignant about the FBI using his footage. Indeed, he seems like someone who'd be tetchy in that respect regardless.) Nor am I particularly keen on the ending's cute full-circle irony, even if panning to Wexler as he simultaneously pans to us adds meta-commentary. That this is his only notable film (as a director) makes sense to me—it's really a mishmash of intriguing but half-digested ideas, given considerable heft by Wexler's genuinely revolutionary doc/fiction line-straddling. 

Individual sequences are plenty potent, though. Cassellis' visit to the cab driver's apartment, for example, briefly ignites a remarkably blunt racial confrontation, as our ostensible hero finds himself blocked from leaving the apartment by multiple black folks objecting to his superficial line of inquiry. "You came down here to shoot 15 minutes of what it's taken 300 years to develop," one guy observes. "And all we're trying to explain to you is that you don't understand." Half a century later, that notion is only just starting to finally get some traction, and it's arresting to see it surface so cleanly here. Wexler then has two other men directly address the camera, voicing their dissatisfaction with how the media treats African-Americans. "Why you always got to wait 'til somebody get killed, man? Because somebody is gonna get killed!" SMASH CUT TO: A middle-aged white lady unloading at a firing range. Bracing, and I'm not sure what it's doing in the same movie as, say, Cassellis and Eileen dancing to "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" Forster and Bloom are both great actors (pretty sure I didn't know who Forster was when I first saw this, two years prior to Jackie Brown; Bloom I knew from her work for Scorsese, plus of course Mrs. Wormer), so they successfully create the illusion of three-dimensional characters, but ultimately I only care about these people insofar as they brush up against what was happening in the country at that moment. And then I'm mostly looking elsewhere. Which makes me feel like a straight documentary (e.g. Chicago 10, minus the animated trial sections) would have been equally if not more effective, despite the thrilling cognitive dissonance of seeing Eileen amidst the riots. More groundbreaking than great is what I think I'm trying to say.