Dadetown (1995, Russ Hexter) (Patreon)

93/100

[If you know nothing about this film, I urge you to keep it that way. Don't read on, and the next time it turns up on YouTube, just watch it, without looking anything up first.]

Third viewing, last seen 2000 (on a VHS tape sent to me by John Pierson, after I met him at a press screening and the film came up in conversation, with me lamenting my inability to revisit it; he took my address and promptly sent me a copy). What really matters, however, is my initial viewing, which was ideal: Two days before Dadetown opened in NYC, I attended a sneak preview (most likely one of those deals where someone hands you a flyer on the street), going in with zero foreknowledge beyond "documentary" and a tagline that was something along the lines of "The small town with a big secret." I vividly recall, as the closing credits began to roll, thinking that it was among the finest docs I'd ever seen, but also still wondering what the big secret was supposed to be. 

What happened next remains one of the most memorable and exhilarating cinematic experiences of my life. After the main credits—everyone from director Russ Hexter, who was already dead at that point (of an aortic aneurysm at age 27; this was his only film), to the DP, editor and production designer—we suddenly get an additional talking-head interview. This is hard to describe without prematurely getting into Dadetown's subject, but the person in question casually says something that nobody would ever utter with a camera rolling—words so shocking that they elicited audible gasps from the audience. (Basically, it's a PR flack suggesting that his company may soon hire mercenaries to take out Dadetown's troublemakers.) And then, before we'd had time to process that insanity, the credits resumed...with a full cast list. 

People who watch Dadetown nowadays, generally knowing in advance that it's a mock-doc, often state that it's obviously fake and assert that they wouldn't have been fooled for a second. Having actually seen the film with an unwitting audience, I call bullshit. We had not even an inkling. I know that because the entire house exploded at the sight of the cast list, and then gave the movie a standing ovation—possibly the only time I've ever seen that happen in a non-festival context, with nobody who worked on the film present. Watching it again a few days ago, I looked hard for indications of acting and scripting, came up almost entirely empty. There's one point at which three women are asked what they think API (the name of a tech company) might stand for, and they come up with somewhat clever responses—Associated Prevaricators, Inc.; Alien Persons Invade—more quickly than is perhaps plausible. That's about it, though. Hexter and his co-screenwriter, John Housley (who has no other IMDb credits), expertly build the narrative in a way that keeps escalating tension and adding startling developments without ever seeming manufactured, and the performances, which I assume were largely improvised (working from an outline or some such), are to me indistinguishable from what you see in a zillion real documentaries. (In particular, Hexter populates Dadetown with completely ordinary faces—only the PR guy, appropriately, looks like he might be a professional actor*. Uncannily resembles Greg Kinnear, actually.) Most crucially, Dadetown replicates the rhythm and tenor of a legit doc. It doesn't go for jokes (apart from the single minor instance noted above), nor does it push too hard for dramatic intensity or thematic relevance. Can't imagine a better simulacrum. 

Here's the thing, though. At any movie, some people bolt the theater as soon as the credits start. (MoMA is notorious for patrons who get up and leave the moment they sense that the plot has been resolved, as if they were attending a football game and the score was 42-3 midway through the fourth quarter. They were strictly there to find out what happens; time to beat the rush!) I saw people do that at Dadetown, and for all I know, they still think, to this day, that they saw a real documentary. Short of an emergency or my dad insisting, I'm in my seat until the screen goes totally blank...but had I made an early exit and missed the revelation, this film would still almost certainly have found a place on that year's top 10 list (albeit probably lower than #3). The dynamic that Hexter and Housley invented, with an upstate New York town split between the longtime factory (which had once made airplane fuselages, now produces staples and paper clips) and a "gentrifying" tech company seeking a tax shelter, was credibly fraught at the time and only seems more so from today's perspective. One complaint I recall some people making in ’96 was that API's employees come across as cartoonishly awful, with their smugly patronizing attitudes and their proudly conspicuous consumption; now, they look positively restrained compared to just about everyone on Instagram. "Any similarity to actual small towns across America is completely intentional," states the credit "disclaimer," and at most this seems exaggerated by 5-10%, mostly by speeding up the timeline a bit—and even then, the film makes a point of noting that API had been present in Dadetown for some 2½ years before the film crew even shows up. 

Part of what makes Dadetown so convincing is that it declines to paint its very lightly satirical portrait in heavy-handed black and white. To a large extent, what happens with the factory echoes the events of any labor struggle you can think of, and the layoffs we see likely would have happened eventually whether API were there or not. It's arguably too neat a symmetry that American Peripheral Imaging involves the enhancement of paperless communication, but the pending decline of paper in business (and concomitant decline in paper clip and stapler demand), along with the effect of competition from pools of egregiously cheap labor overseas, was already identifiable in the mid-'90s, and there's no direct cause-effect relationship shown during the course of the movie. It's nonetheless entirely believable that laid-off factory workers would perceive API as the enemy (especially given that they'd already balked at various tony changes being made, catering to their new, much wealthier neighbors), resulting in an angry town-hall meeting that for my money is no less impressive than the one in Mungiu's R.M.N. (We even get a brief instance of racial resentment, though the town is extremely white.) At the same time, those who benefit financially from API's presence, like the construction foreman who's building their ritzy houses, whistle an entirely different tune. The situation is so gratifyingly and persuasively complex that I never initially questioned it when an API honcho talks about the company's "tactical isolated relocation" (i.e. let's consolidate the business in some inexpensive burg), or when one of the townspeople, amused by the unaccustomed sight of men wearing suits, gets off a mildly funny one-liner ("Nothin'll spook a deer faster"). Hexter even tweaks the viewer by opening with someone who's revealed to be reading lines from a strategically placed cue card—the mock-doc equivalent of having a mystery's killer be the first and most obvious suspect. Because Hexter died before the film was even released, we'll never know whether Dadetown was a crafty one-off or the beginning of a remarkable career. And I'll never know whether I'd consider it a masterpiece had I not been blindsided by its true nature. That collective burst of giddy astonishment will stay with me as long as I live. 

* One of the actors, Edith Meeks, went on to star in two of Dan Sallitt's films. And I'd previously seen her in Poison and Safe, apparently, but didn't remember her; they're presumably small roles. (Safe credits her as Patient No. 1.)