Utne Reader Film Reviews, November-December 2008

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Mommy Dearest
Manhattan, Kansas
(Carnivalesque; on DVD)

“Do you want to lick the spoon?” Usually, it’s the parent who poses this cookie-baking query to the child. In the evocative personal documentary Manhattan, Kansas, the roles are painfully reversed. Tara Wray has always wanted a “normal” mom; what she got was Evie Wray, a free spirit and undiagnosed head case who flipped out when Tara left the nest at 19. After five years away, Wray returns, with a documentary camera crew in tow. The result is a dysfunctional family portrait that unfolds with increasing resonance. Wray’s movie isn’t just therapy; it’s a poetic, universal journey about everyone’s need to connect with Mommy, no matter how crazy she is.  —A.K.

Through the Microscope
Proteus
(First Run Features; on DVD)

Writer-director David Lebrun’s Proteus is by turns a conventional biographical documentary, cleverly curated museum show, animated college lecture, and precision instrument of trance induction. The movie tells—and, importantly, shows—the story of zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who discovered and described thousands of the one-celled animals known as protozoa. It involves Goethe’s Faust, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and the occasional trippy montage of lovely, grotesque, endlessly shape-shifting microscopic organisms. The result is a bewitching, cinematically fluent unification of science and imagination. —Jonathan Kiefer

Big Waves, Big Hearts
Sliding Liberia
(VAS Entertainment; on DVD)

Sliding Liberia feels strange at first, combining action footage of surfing Westerners on holiday with a documentary view of the war- and poverty-wracked people of Liberia. But settle into the film’s gentle groove and the distance between those worlds collapses. Filmmaker Britton Caillouette makes no pretense about his original mission: He came to Liberia to catch some gnarly waves. Like a good tourist, though, he listened to the locals and learned their story, and in Sliding Liberia he lets them tell it in their own words. Two civil wars and loads of heartache make for intense interviews, and ultimately the surf interludes give the viewer’s mind
a much-needed break at the beach. —Keith Goetzman

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