THE WINDMILL MOVIE
Edited, Written & Directed by Alexander Olch
Produced by Susan Meiselas
Released by the Film Desk
USA. 82 min. Not Rated   
 

I wasn’t familiar with the work of the late Richard P. Rogers before I saw this film. In some ways, that may have primed me for the unexpected and moving experience of watching it. Intended as an intimate documentary about an accomplished filmmaker, The Windmill Movie succeeds on a far wider plain. No doubt, the act of the filmmaker turning the camera on himself is steeped in metaphor, but with a film so full of incidental insight and natural poetry, Rogers’ day job of making movies becomes all but irrelevant.

Patched together post-mortem by Rogers’ friend and former student Alexander Olch, the dizzying portrait is complied from hundreds of hours of Rogers’ own footage, along with a few whimsically fictional scenes featuring celebrity friend Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre). Rogers, a neurotic, baby-faced, self-effacing WASP, was acclaimed for his experimental and social-minded documentaries (the short, Quarry (1970), will be screened before this film), but he dedicated much of his life to an autobiographical film that he would never finish.

Rogers tapes everything—moneyed gatherings in the Hamptons, his longtime partner and renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, a spattering of girlfriends, and, most prodigiously,  himself, sometimes naked in the bathtub, sometimes recovering in a hospital bed. The commentary is provided by Rogers’ monologues from behind the camera and implied in the critical gaze of his lens.

This was a man whose love for life was equaled only by his discomfort with it. Rogers struggled with a desire to scale the social ladder propped up by the world of privilege around him. He freely voiced his yearning for Steven Spielberg’s fame or his neighbor’s money, but instantly shamed himself for these very notions. He saw the charade of idyllic Hamptons living (outing his family’s elegant cocktail hour as just a “prelude to getting shitfaced”), but he participated in it like an obliging spy.

The Windmill Movie gives voice to a neurotic griping (too often relegated to comedy) that resonates with existential truth. In one endearing moment, Rogers inquires, why can’t a well-off, white man “complain in the Hamptons?” And while funny, his observations about his damaged family (his mother fills out the cold-hearted, gin-soaked WASP stereotype) or his aimless life cut right to the core of our insecurities. “I am a man capable of making small talk and not much else,” Rogers says, with an honesty and simplicity that invites laughter but sets the stage for tears. In fact, that may be said of the movie as a whole. The amusing, voyeuristic brew—even if it is about a man we never knew—teases the audience with giggles right before it blindsides us with insight and emotion. Yana Litovsky
June 17, 2009