MIFF 2011: LSD Pranksters, Androgynous Children & Me

 

 

Alex Gibney is a documentary filmmaker whom I greatly admire. His films are usually well-crafted, impeccably researched and generally quite enlightening. MAGIC TRIP on the other hand, is none of those things and offers up the first real turkey of Gibney's career.

 

 

MAGIC TRIP tells the story of Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, or more specifically of their first trip across America in 1964. I'm personally a huge fan of the Pranksters and reasonably familiar with their story so in approaching this film I was more interested in how it was to be presented rather than expecting anything particularly new to me. Gibney's main conceit with MAGIC TRIP is that he constructs the film mostly from footage the Pranksters shot themselves during this time. Clearly painstakingly restored (I have seem some of this footage before in earlier films and it never looked nearly this good), the genesis of this film seems to be the opportunity to feature some of these unseen clips. While it is fascinatingg seeing some of these moments – footage of Neil Cassady and Jack Keroauc being definite highlights – it is very clear that Gibney has had great difficulty finding the real story in MAGIC TRIP.

 

The problem with this film is it meanders around with very little purpose for most of its (over-long) running time. It also ironically turns the most interesting part of the Prankster story into the most tedious stretch of the film. MAGIC TRIP is almost solely interested in this first journey from West to East that they travelled. About 80 minutes in, they complete that journey but then we get a brief final act outlining 'what happened next' which results in over-simplification and trite aphorisms (is 'the journey is what's important not the destination' really the best thematic conclusion one can come up with from all of this?).

 

Gibney is all over the shop with MAGIC TRIP. His main interest seems to be to localise the story and make the audience feel as if they too are on this journey in the bus. Fine, but this technique will inevitably avoid any closer examination of the wider cultural and political ramifications of what the Pranksters truly represented at the time and Gibney can't skip that so we get some quick sidebars mentioning civil rights and feminism. A classic case of a film trying to have its cake and eat it too.

 

Ultimately MAGIC TRIP is tedious, irrelevant, disgustingly nostalgic in a revisionist way and ultimately totally pointless. Long story short, I didn't like it... That enough for you?

 

TOMBOY on the other hand has slowly revealed itself to be one of the most fascinating things I have seen all festival. It completely washed MAGIC TRIP from my mind and kept me thinking for quite some time after it finished.

 

TOMBOY tells the story of Laure/Mikael, a 10 year old girl who dresses boyishly and introduces herself as a boy to a new group of friends. What could've easily turned into a gimmicky or even facile film slowly becomes a subtle examination of the roots of gender identity. The film cleverly places itself almost entirely within the perspective of its child protagonists. This enables it to present a simple story with a shade of innocence, stripped of adult judgements.

 

TOMBOY forces its audience to confront their own personal questions about gender but in the most gentle way you could imagine. Laure/Mikael is never given some reductive motivation for wanting to be considered a boy instead of a girl and this is especially significant. Her connection with a male identity seems to be a very organic, almost natural process and the different ways the children around her respond to this offer up a multitude of equally innocent yet wholly loaded situations.

 

TOMBOY is a remarkable achievement that left me thinking for hours afterwards. This is a very good film folks.

 

I saw KILL LIST again. My original review is here. I stand by that. I loved it a second time and have plenty to say about it (it is a deceptively clever film with some truly magnificent foreshadowing) but will only say one thing here. See it.