Morgan Neville

  • Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m not one for celebrity worship or performative displays of grief when a famous figure dies, but Anthony Bourdain’s suicide in 2018 felt different. I first knew of him as an author than a TV personality, and I’m significantly more attached to writers than other kinds of celebrities. Then there’s the idea that Bourdain seemed to be the kind of person who was more alive than most people. From being a middling chef and a failed novelist, he wrote the literary equivalent of a Grand Slam with Kitchen Confidential and parlayed his notoriety in becoming a TV star with globe-trotting shows. He remarried, became a father and seemed to enjoy what life had for him. Much of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain revolves around the big question left behind by his suicide in a small French inn: how did he end up there, doing that? The film asks itself the question early on, but completes a whirlwind overview of his last twenty years before getting back to it. Documentarian Morgan Neville (who scored notable hits with such films as Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) has a wealth of material available to him in telling Bourdain’s story: archival footage (including incredible footage of Bourdain as a chef in the late 1990s), friendly testimonials, behind-the-scenes material from his TV shows and quite a bit of writing/narration from Bourdain himself. (If you find yourself watching the film and having an instinctive alert that “this doesn’t sound quite like his voice” or “how did they get access to that narration?”, pay attention to your knee-jerk reaction – Neville used AI technology to -imperfectly- recreate Bourdain’s voice from some of his writing and let’s just say that this raises huge questions about documentary ethics.)  As an overview of Bourdain’s rise to fame and his many years spent travelling the globe, Roadrunner offers evocative material. While this is a very friendly biography, it doesn’t stop itself from commenting on Bourdain’s very dark outlook on life. By the time we get to the end of the film, we have layers to unwrap – Bourdain killed himself because he was depressed, yes – he was depressed partially because of a whirlwind romance and breakup with Asia Argento that affected his character, yes – but in the end, the impression left by Neville is that Bourdain spent a life being self-destructive, and his sudden fame, family life, and ability to do what he wanted were a reprieve from something that could have happened years earlier in different circumstances. Roadrunner shows the oft-unglamorous toll that his lifestyle took, spending months away from home every year, but also how Bourdain refused to make it easier on him… perhaps because he suspected what would happen if he stopped running. Neville is a crafty filmmaker in many ways – in addition to re-creating Bourdain’s voice, he also stages a mural defacement as a punk middle-finger of a conclusion. Both of those excesses are regrettable, largely because they’re futile: he had more than enough strong material here to avoid resorting to such manufactured theatrics. They end up harming a film that would have been much better without them. Still, for Bourdain fans, Roadrunner is quite a film – a perspective to his work that doesn’t contradict as much as it complements it.

  • Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

    Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2021) I was very, very late in understanding the accomplishments of Fred Rogers as a kid’s TV host. Much of it is due to the fact that I didn’t speak much English when I was in Mr. Rogers’ target audience. Obviously, I became aware of his saintlike reputation over the years, but it wasn’t until a year or two ago that I actually watched a rerun of the show and was astonished at how… calm and gentle it was. I happened to catch the Tom Hanks biopic a few months ago, but it’s only now that I sat down to watch the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, exploring Roger’s life, accomplishments, and entire philosophy. Using interviews, show footage and some animated segments featuring Daniel Tiger (explicitly presented as an alter ego for Rogers), this is a documentary that starts from the same question as the Hanks docufiction: Was Mr. Rogers for real? Was he as benevolent and kind-hearted as his reputation made him out to be? As the documentary eventually points out, this seems to be difficult for people to accept — we’d rather believe that he was a Navy SEAL who swore off killing than accept that such a genuinely nice person could exist, incidentally suggesting that we are not as nice as we could be. One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is how it tracks the strong association between Rogers’ approach and his own faith—an ordained minister, Rogers sometimes referred to his show as a ministry, and it’s not rare for the documentary to use spiritual or religious language in describing his actions—anyone calling him a saint, for instance, because the modern vernacular does not have other words descriptive enough. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? does fully engage with the notions of absolute goodness, and as time goes by, I suspect that its 2018 release date will weigh more and more heavily as a reminder of where it came from, two years into a nakedly malevolent American presidency that had viewers struggling to accept how someone without moral qualities could be voted into the highest office of the land. In this light, the example of Mr. Rogers becomes essential. Rogers was kind because he operated from a set of core principles: respect the child, protect the child and be honest with the child. Some of the show footage is gobsmacking in its forthrightness — who would now even dare discuss political assassinations on a kid’s show? What makes a lot of adults very uncomfortable, however, is when Rogers used this same basic honesty on adults — essentially treating adults the way he’d like kids to be treated, and the effect was usually disarming (even against prickly US senators). Won’t You Be My Neighbor? does poke and prod at the legend, but the worst it can find about Rogers is a childhood of being bullied, a bit of dissociation with his puppets, and an increasing righteousness as he became older — not exactly anything embarrassing, nor out-of-character for his public persona. Asked if Mr. Rogers was the real thing, all interviewers agreed that he was. Clips of people criticizing Rogers without even understanding what he was trying to do reflect badly on the criticizers (and may induce some outrage in viewers). But where Won’t You Be My Neighbor? further distinguishes itself from other standard biopics is in its willingness to try using some of Mr. Rogers’ humanity on its interviewees and audience: the film ends on an incredibly poignant note as, in countering despair about the lack of kindness, interviewees are asked to spend one silent minute thinking about kind people who helped them become who they are. Tears well up, the silence holds and the sequence ends with many interviewees thanking director Morgan Neville for the moment. It’s an incredible finish to an exceptional film about an extraordinary man. Yes, Mr. Rogers was exactly who he appeared to be. Yes, he was better than most of us. Yes, we can do better in aspiring to be like him.