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PROTAGONIST
Edited & Directed by Jessica Yu.
Produced by Elise Pearlstein, Susan West & Yu.
Director of Photography, Russell Harper & Karl Hahn.
Music by Jeff Beal.
Released by IFC Films/Red Envelope Entertainment.
USA. 90 min. Rated R.
With Hans-Joachim Klein, Mark Pierpont, Joe Loya & Mark Salzman.

“I’m very wary of people who are certain,” says Joe Loya, one of four tragic heroes in Jessica Wu’s documentary Protagonist. Wu intersperses interviews of four men – a former German militant, an “ex-homosexual” missionary who finally comes out, a novelist who became involved in extreme king fu as a teen, and a bank robber-turned-journalist – with scenes from Euripides enacted with puppets.

The puppets and the homage to classical tragedy might come off as pretentious or precious in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, but Yu manages to make each scene riveting and arresting. Protagonist has a great many similarities to Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control – both feature men struggling to become the masters of their own lives and reckoning with the role of God. In Morris’s film, the men in question are eccentric geniuses, resolutely creating their own worlds. In Protagonist, the four have lives that, according to Wu, mirror “the dramatic arc of a certain Euripidean tragedy – the tragedy of the extremist.” Unlike the extremists in Electra or The Bacchae, though, these real-life protagonists have happy endings. They question themselves, they transform, they move from the fever of fanaticism through catharsis to doubt and reflection.

The dangers of excess certainty and the tragedy inherent in extremism link the men’s stories. Mark Piermont, raised in a strict Christian family in New Jersey, becomes a missionary to save himself and others from the sin of homosexuality. After Mexican-American Joe Loya loses his mother at age seven, his father becomes brutally violent. At 16, he stabs his father while protecting his smaller brother, and feels high at the sense of power it gives him. He reenacts that feeling robbing banks. Mark Salzman, the smallest kid in his class (and Yu's husband), responds to his passive parents and bullying schoolmates by committing himself to a life of martial arts with one extremely unorthodox instructor.

Hans-Joachim Klein’s astonishing story begins with a bleak German childhood. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, killed herself, and his policeman father maintained that “Hitler was a great man.” In the 1970s, Klein becomes radicalized and a comrade in the terrorist group Revolutionary Cells. (Klein also featured prominently in Barbet Schroeder’s recent documentary Terror’s Advocate.)

Each man has a single, pivotal moment of sudden realization that everything he has believed is undeniably, horrifically wrong. Like Agave in The Bacchae, who comes out of her fevered frenzy to understand that she is carrying her own son’s bloody, severed head on a stake, these men move from delusion to clarity. And each is, in his own way, a sympathetic and charismatic character. There’s an electric quality to Wu’s presentation of their stories that illuminates how four very different lives, on a big or small scale, contain grand and epic elements, following the outline of classic drama. Elizabeth Bachner
November 30, 2007