Movie Movie
FILM: American Movie
DIRECTOR: Chris Smtih
STARRING: Mark Borchardt, Mike Schank
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MARK BORCHARDT (RIGHT) CASTS HIS DAFFY UNCLE BILL FOR HIS FILM IN CHRIS SMITH'S
DOCUMENTARY AMERICAN MOVIE.
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American Movie is a documentary about a movie that's never been made,
and odds are never will be made. It's the story of Mark Borchardt, a
working-class guy from the Milwaukee suburb of Menomonee Falls with the odd
obsession of making movies. He's been doing it with video cameras and rag ends
of film stock since he was 14 years old. Now he's 30, and he wants to make a
feature titled Northwestern. In a normal documentary, you'd find out
what Northwestern is about. In American Movie, we never
do. That's because Mark Borchardt is long on dreams and short on just about
everything else: money and time, certainly; talent, probably.
In the early going of American Movie, Borchardt calls
production meetings, hands out a series of titles, passes around storyboards
and generally cheerleads for his pro-ject. How in the world he thinks he's
about to make a feature-length film is a complete mystery. He doesn't appear to
have a dime. Pretty soon, things have fallen apart and Borchardt has a new
idea: he'll put Northwestern on hold while he finishes Coven (for
some reason, ignorance evidently, he pronounces it with a long O as in "low
men"), a 30-minute short he had started and abandoned earlier. His revised
scheme is to finish Coven, sell 3,000 units on videotape and use the
proceeds to finance a return to Northwestern.
Coven is a horror film that looks like something made by Ed
Wood. Its making is hilarious, though not intentionally so. Just before one
filming session, Borchardt wheedles his mother to serve as an extra even though
she desperately wants to go grocery shopping. In a fight scene, Borchardt
nearly bashes in the brains of one his actors when a cabinet door fails to
break apart as it's supposed to. Borchardt has cast his aging and apparently
alcoholic uncle Bill in a bit part, and we watch at first in mirth and then
with increasing discomfort as Borchardt tries to get the old man to remember
two sentences of dialogue.
American Movie director Chris Smith has said that he came to
feel friendship for Mark Borchardt and that he admires Borchardt's
determination. And one certainly has to give Borchardt credit for valiant
perseverance. A high school drop-out, he is self-taught. For years, he
supported himself delivering newspapers. By the end of the film, he's working
as a custodian at a cemetery.
One also has to credit Borchardt for the loyalty of his odd
menagerie of friends, including the seemingly drug-addled Mike Schank and
sometime-jailbird Ken Keen. They stand by Borchardt through thin and
threadbare. Still, one can't help but wonder about Borchardt's judgment. He's
fathered three children with a woman he never married. He admits to being
thousands of dollars behind in child support payments. He owes his father
$10,000. And his relationship with his uncle Bill, who lives in a trailer but
has managed to save nearly $300,000, ranges from relentless badgering to
shameful patronization. Moreover, Borchardt is seen as arrogant and abrasive by
his brothers and, though she doesn't employ the term, as pathetically delusive
by his mother.
Others have complimented director Smith for avoiding the trap of
making Mark Borchardt the object of ridicule. My reaction was largely the
opposite; Borchardt is stubbornly ill-educated, completely unrealistic and
sadly undisciplined. He exploits the members of his family, and he provides
poorly for his children. Smith might think it's admirable that Borchardt is so
dedicated to the dream of being a filmmaker, but the director must know that
Borchardt's aspirations to become rich by doing so are outrageously laughable.
And if Smith doesn't want us to laugh at them, then why does he feature
Borchardt in front of a huge, fancy house, running on about how he'll own an
even better home some day?
Yes, we laugh at this movie, often and hard. We laugh at the
members of Borchardt's family, at his friends, at the goofy actors who appear
in his film, at the ridiculously rosy world view of Joan Petrie, the new woman
in Borchardt's life, now holding the title of associate producer. Most of all,
we laugh at Borchardt. We laugh at all these people, and that's what we're
supposed to do, for that laughter provides the sum total of this picture's
entertainment value. But I gradually grew profoundly uncomfortable. Whatever
his flaws, Mark Borchardt is a human being. But American Movie sees him
as a feature-length joke.
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