Operation Varsity Blues (2021, Chris Smith) (Patreon)

61/100

Chris Smith's touch couldn't get me beyond the opening 10 minutes of Fyre, and this looked from a distance to be cut from the same dutifully-topical cloth. But I'm partial to what I now think of as the Wormwood approach, and got sucked in by the dizzying pace Smith sets here, juxtaposing rapid-fire talking heads (most of them shot at the same medium distance in front of the same neutral background, so that they come across as a sort of single-file Greek chorus) with staged re-creations of wiretapped phone calls. The latter fascinate in part, of course, because we know that they're taken nearly verbatim from federal transcripts, but also because Smith made the offbeat decision not to conventionally dramatize them—Modine and his fellow actors retain the actual conversations' essential banality, even when parents are explicitly anxious about the possibility of getting caught. Paradoxically, this makes those scenes feel slightly stilted (if only by unconscious mental contrast with how a "normal," fully fictionalized movie would depict them), which makes for an arresting contrast with Smith's striking formal dynamism. He keeps Modine's Rick Singer in constant motion, employing a truly insane number of fundamentally interstitial camera setups—on planes, at airports, in cars, walking to and from various university buildings—for a documentary. It's like watching one of those shark species that would asphyxiate if it ever stopped swimming. As a bonus, you also get plenty of demoralizing details about college admission as yet another aspect of American society that's studiously designed to benefit the already overprivileged, along with the account of one comparatively decent athletic coach who wound up screwed by the system. But anyone who appreciates expert filmmaking, and laments its general doc-world absence, will be grateful just to be in skilled hands 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: This is one of those docs with a marketing-only subtitle. Netflix wants its subscribers to know that it's about The College Admissions Scandal, and fears that many won't recognize Operation Varsity Blues on its own; the latter is all that appears onscreen, however.