Can documentaries be too good to be true? Critics and audiences have been debating that question as gifted filmmakers use traditional fictional tools to make factual stories as compelling as cutting-edge comedies or dramas.
Nanette Burstein's American Teen and James Marsh's Man on Wire, which open Friday in Baltimore, are two of the year's best documentaries - and best movies. Yet, Burstein has been accused of manipulating a handful of teenagers into a new-millennial The Breakfast Club.
If Marsh hasn't roused similar controversy, it's because his subject - Philippe Petit, the French high-wire daredevil who, in 1974, walked between the World Trade Center's twin towers - is a stranger-than-fiction fellow, as charismatic on a high wire as Barack Obama at a podium.
Burstein rearranged 5 percent of the footage that wound up in her finished movie to strengthen its clarity and momentum. Marsh used actors to recreate Petit's New York-based preparations for his assault on the WTC, fashioning scenes with the moody grit of European capers like Rififi.
Despite the filmmakers' legerdemain, these movies have an honest and resounding ring to them. They demonstrate that documentary filmmakers can take their work in novel, and often novelistic, directions without sacrificing truth and integrity.
As Marsh told me on his cell phone while en route to his Brooklyn home, documentary-makers have found two ways to break out of a narrow niche. One is to establish a dynamic onscreen persona in the manner of Michael Moore. The other is to "tell a great, gripping, rollicking yarn" - and that's what Burstein and Marsh do.
Burstein, also a New Yorker, applied her dramatic instincts and her built-in truth detector to American Teen, moving it closer to a Robert Altman ensemble-piece than to reality TV.
Marsh saw Man on Wire as equal parts fairy tale and urban legend, and ended up with a cross between an art movie like Rivers and Tides and an action blockbuster.
"You go see The Dark Knight and it's all CGI; here we have a flesh and blood man, and he exerts a strong appeal to the audience with a miraculous kind of vision," Marsh says. "He saw what he did as a spontaneous gift to the city, something that just happened, like a dream. I would never reconstruct any of that, or let trickery intrude on that part of the film."
Their personal commitment to their subject matter gives their work a vital hum.
