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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Journalism > Politics > Counterculture > Documentary > Cinema Verite > Kino Pravda > Medium Cool (1969/Paramount/Criterion Collection Blu-ray)

Medium Cool (1969/Paramount/Criterion Collection Blu-ray)


Picture: A Sound: B Extras: A Film: B



Medium Cool is one of those films whose reputations precedes it. Cinematographer-turned-director Haskell Wexler exploded the lines between documentary and narrative fiction in his story about a TV newsman (Robert Forster) on a 110-minute journey of disenchantment - with his profession, with the system, with himself - by placing his actors in unstaged scenes, most notably in the climax at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Wexler shot Forester on the job inside the DNC, while his co-star Vera Bloom, costumed in a canary yellow dress, gets caught in the thick of a police crackdown on protests outside convention hall. One shot, where cops fire tear gas at protesters, ends famously with the line, Watch out, Haskell, it's real!


If you're at all plugged in to cinema, you know Medium Cool from those climactic moments even if you've never seen the full film. It's availability had been sketchy in the DVD era (there was a disc from Paramount that has been out of print for years), though that's all changed thanks to the excellent Criterion Collection release of the film. But like anything with reputational baggage, the reality of the thing is far less exciting.


That's a tough thing to say from a film that crackles with energy and ingenuity. It opens on Forster and his sound guy shooting footage of a highway car crash. The duo stalk the wreck, casing it for gory angles and wrenching audio, which is disrupted by the loud, high-pitch drone of the car's horn - until the soundman callously disconnects it from the engine and the scene goes silent, save for the last gasps of a driver. It's a crushing scene of callousness, rendered all the more challenging for Wexler's documentarian camerawork. (Nightcrawler is a feature-length extension of this gut-punch moment.) One of the next scenes is a party full of reporters talking politics and bemoaning this or that about their profession (were journalists ever satisfied?) that calls back visually and spiritually to a similar gathering in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (whose Criterion edition is sadly out of print and very valuable.) Again, Wexler deftly places us right there, amongst the political angst and professional malaise. We feel like we're intruding, but in the way that we're late to the conversation, not uninvited crashers.


We get a couple more of these documentary moments - Forster and his crew shooting National Guard training exercises and a protest camp on the National Mall - but then Medium Cool lays on the narrative. Forster at home, Forster at the office, Forster getting cozy with Bloom, who plays a single mother from West Virginia whose husband was killed in Vietnam, and hanging out with Bloom's on-screen son. There are some 'real' moments sprinkled in here (a date at a roller derby, interviews with Robert Kennedy supporters), and they're a welcome relief from the tedium. As constructed, the narrative elements are so stagy and contrived that they utterly derail the film. They're this weird dead space we have to suffer to get to the next on-the-scene moment and, ultimately, the DNC.


It didn't have to be that way, though. It's a bit ridiculous to offer advice to a movie that's nearly 50 years old, but had Wexler shot the whole thing as a documentary rather than hedge it (I'm guessing to make it palatable for the studio) Medium Cool would be an unassailable masterpiece. And there's proof of concept in the completed film, which makes it all the more frustrating.


In the middle of the film, Forster catches wind of a story about a black hack who found thousand of dollars in the backseat of his cab and decided to return it. After twisting his editor's arm to give him the resources to do a human-interest story on the driver (a battle that contributes to him later losing his job), Forster takes his audio tech to a rough part of Chicago to get the cabbie on the record. When they get to the subject's apartment, though, they're confronted by a gathering of friends and family frustrated that white journalists are only interested in black people when the story is uplifting. They don't care about the struggle, danger, hardship, or inequity that puts black citizens on an entirely different social footing from whites.


Wexler attacks the scene as a documentarian would, leveraging the cramped quarters of the small apartment to heighten his characters' claustrophobia and ours, and then allowing the driver's associates directly address the camera with their accusations, condemnations, and prescriptions. Outside of the DNC segment, it's the most powerful moment of the film - not only because the anger and frustration resonates across the decades as clearly and relevantly as if today were 1968, but because it has the vitality and urgency of verite where so much of the other narratively-guided scenes are limp and lifeless.


Scenes like those in the apartment and at the convention work so well because Wexler is as skilled a documentarian as he is a cinematographer. (His work on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and In the Heat of the Night is some of the best ever committed to celluloid.) He also has a finely tuned social conscious, so when he sees indignity or mistreatment or an absurd bastardization of American ideals he's more than willing to turn his camera in that direction. Medium Cool works best - and, indeed, solidifies its reputation - when it captures America's from-the-inside-out rot. The film was released in 1969, but perhaps more than any other film represents a document of the wave of protests in 1968 protest hitting this country's shores. And if only on that score, it deserves its Criterion canonization. But it could have been - should have been - so, so, so much better. Maybe if Easy Rider (on Criterion Blu-ray, reviewed elsewhere on this site) had blown up Hollywood's expectations in 1968 rather than a year later, Wexler could have turned Medium Cool into the film only hinted at in in the final product.


One thing that is beyond reproach, though, is Criterion's Blu-ray presentation. The new 4K digital restoration, approved by Wexler, is breathtaking. The picture is crisp and clean without losing any of the magic of the original 16mm and 35mm film negative. Blacks are deep, the contrast is nuanced, and colors just pop: Bloom's iconic sun-yellow dress is warm yet evocative, Chicago PD's blue uniforms and helmets are pacifying yet threatening, and the convention's red, white, and blue bunting is defiantly patriotic yet blindingly menacing. On the audio side, the uncompressed monaural soundtrack is free of pops or hiss and wonderfully textured. It wonderfully captures the small incidental sounds (kids playing, trucks passing by, fans whirring) of Bloom's housing project as well as the cacophony (tear gas canisters exploding, clubs connecting with bodies, terrified screams) of the DNC protest.


Extras-wise, the disc is stacked. There are two commentaries, one with Wexler, editorial consultant Paul Golding, and actor Marianna Hill, while the second features historian Paul Cronin. There's a new interview with Wexler, excerpts from Cronin's documentaries Look Out Haskell, It's Real!, about the making of Medium Cool, and Sooner or Later, which catches up with Harold Blankenship, who plays Bloom's son in the film. There's also an essay about Medium Cool by film critic and programmer Thomas Beard.


The key feature on the disc, though, is Medium Cool Revisited, a 30-minute documentary shot by Wexler at the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago focused on the Occupy movement. In the video, Wexler talks to Occupiers and others sympathetic with the cause about the protest as well as how this experience compares and contrasts with the one he captured in 1968. It's heartening to hear how many people were touched by Medium Cool and how it continues to inspire them to agitate for a better, fairer country, yet it's disheartening to see just how little progress has been made (or even how much we've regressed) since those DNC protests.


But the most resonant moment of the video is one that's a victim of circumstance. At the NATO summit, Wexler talks with James Foley about the dehumanization of war and the experience of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Two years after their conversation, Foley was kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in Syria. Because Criterion's release of Medium Cool preceded that barbaric act, there's no warning that Foley appears in the video. So when he does, and you hear what he's saying... Talk about a gut punch.



- Dante A. Ciampaglia


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