Stone Reader
"All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had really happened." So said Ernest Hemingway, one of the many great writers whose words of wisdom are quoted in Stone Reader, an autobiographical documentary about a filmmakers search for an obscure literary hero. Hemingways words presumably helped inspire writer-director-producer Mark Moskowitz, a longtime creator of political ads who spent several years making this picture. Those same words helped me understand my own reluctance to embrace Stone Reader, a Slamdance award winner that radiates intelligence and compassion, yet strikes me as too polished and packagedand in places, a bit unreal.
The film is about Moskowitzs search for Dow Mossman, author of the 1972 novel The Stones of Summer, a Thomas Wolfe-ish roman á clef about an alienated young American that arrived on bookstore shelves amid critical hype, then disappeared almost instantly. Moskowitz, then a counterculture-minded 18-year-old, first learned about the book in a rave New York Times review by critic John Seelye. Moskowitz headed to a local bookstore and bought a copy, but found the prose too dense and abandoned it after 20 pages. A quarter-century later, he picked up The Stones of Summer again, devoured every word and went online looking for other books by Mossman. To his astonishment, not only were there no more titles, he found no record of Mossman or his novel ever having existed. Moskowitz made Stone Reader in an attempt to figure out what happened to Mossman, and to understand the reasons behind his own adoration of Mossmans novel.
Part love letter, part detective story and part picaresque narrative, Stone Reader is structured like a cross between Roger & Me and Heart of Darkness. Director Moskowitz also hosts the movie; hes its amiable Marlow, piloting a rickety documentary boat through Americas literary rivers in search of the elusive, Kurtz-like Mossman, meeting and interviewing various critics, publishers, editors and contemporaries along the way.
Moskowitz wants to track down Mossman and ask him why he stopped writing after just one book; barring that, hed be satisfied with some solid speculations by people who knew Mossman or the book trade. Moskowitzs sources include reviewer-professor Seelye, professor and critic Leslie Fiedler, former Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb and Frank Conroy, head of the Iowa Writers Workshop, which Mossman attended. A couple of these folks describe Mossman as a genius amateur who lacked professional distancean artist who couldnt handle the machinelike pressure of the publishing industry, and who felt so intensely that it fried his brain. As described by the movies sources, the most striking thing about Mossman was his aloneness, his tendency to fade into the wallpaper. Even folks who went to school with him dont remember him. Hes American lits Mr. Cellophane.
Mostly, though, Moskowitz is on a journey of self-discovery. The films real subject is the intense relationship between reader and author, with Moskowitz standing in for any avid reader who ever embraced an author that vanished after just one booka subcategory Moskowitz calls "one-and-done." (My favorite one-and-done novel is Theodore Weesners The Car Thief; if you ever come across a copy, buy it immediately.) Id be lying if I said I wasnt on the edge of my seat the whole time; Moskowitz is a skillful storyteller, and hes fashioned Stone Reader into a textbook example of the modern, crowd-pleasing, commercially viable documentary (first-person variety).
But at the risk of unfairly presuming a filmmakers agenda based on his biography, I must say that Moskowitzs resume, printed in the films press kit, made me wonder if he was, in his own sweet way, playing me for a sucker. "Newsweek described his media as brilliantly targeted" says his bio; the description fits Stone Reader as well. Despite being a nonfiction film, it seems as close to a guaranteed art-house box-office hit as youll ever see. The film celebrates books and reading; what civilized person doesnt love books and reading?
In a nod to the commercially viable Michael Moore/Nick Broomfield model of documentary, which allows its filmmaker to serve as protagonist, Stone Reader puts Moskowitz front-and-center throughout. And it craftily delays the arrival of Mossman himself until the last half-hour of the movies 127-minute running time. (Oh, come on, Im not spoiling anything. If Moskowitz never found Mossman, the film wouldnt have won an Audience Award and Special Jury Honor at Slamdance.)
I fully understand the legitimate role artifice plays in documentaries, and have written on the subject many times in this space. Nevertheless, some of Moskowitzs devices struck me as manipulative. For example, notice how Moskowitzs camera just happens to be there at his friend Andys house when a Stone Reader manuscript arrives via overnight mail, and the retrieval of said package is shown from two angles, each well-lit and composed. Similarly miraculous flukes of timing occur throughout the movie, with many different packages, demanding the question: Why did Moskowitz spend money Fed-Exing packages if he was going to drive over to the persons house anyway and film him opening it?
It also struck me as odd that Moskowitzwho works in a business, political advertising, that has refined dirt-digging into a touch-button sciencewould need so much time to find a writer who still lives within a few miles of where he went to school, or that it would have taken Moskowitz over a year to finally figure out that if he visited Mossmans hometown, he might find him (or someone who knew where he was)? Throughout, my pleasure at the films ideas, images, editing, writing and music were compromised by my suspicion that Moskowitz did not go to Iowa right off the bat because if he had, he wouldnt have had a detective story hook. Dont get me wrong; much of Stone Reader feels immediate and genuine, and these small, questionable touches wont ruin the movie for anyone whos already inclined to like it. But Hemingways quote should linger in your mind as you watch it.
Framed
Tilting at windmills: Lost in La Mancha is the most entertaining movie on local screens right now. Its a nonfiction chronicle of how Terry Gilliams last movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, disintegrated within a few weeks of starting production in Spain, thanks to disorganization, bad weather, location troubles and an elderly leading man (Jean Rochefort) with prostate problems. One leaves the documentary impressed not just by the crews perseverance in the face of biblically rotten luck, but by Gilliams mostly even-tempered response to that luck. He keeps grinning even while the world falls down around him; as a torrential hailstorm pounds an outdoor set into mud-soup, Gilliam cackles with ironic glee and howls, "Is it King Lear, or The Wizard of Oz?" The few snippets of footage were shown seem exasperating and delightful, in the time-honored Gilliam style, and costar Johnny Depp is a hoot. Its a shame we never got to see the finished product.
Female trouble: Writer-director Paula van der Oests Zus and Zo reminded me of a subpar episode of Sex and the City, only with better photography. Dont fault the actorsthey do the best they can with a terminally arch and cutesy script about three sisters trying to break up their gay brothers ill-advised marriage to a female friend in order to stop said brother from inheriting a beloved beach house in Portugal. Had enough? Thought Zo.