In its bare outline, American Movie is a documentary about a striving filmmaker. In the telling, it’s about addiction, family dissolution, and stunted ambition. The film ends with the filmmaker debuting his movie. It’s not a triumph. Rather, it’s depressing.
Buy American Movie 4K UHDIt’s depressing because the film he makes is not the one he wants to. He wants to do his dramatic examination of mid-Western life, Northwestern. He tries to get investors and gathers a crew together. The first production meeting has about 15 people involved. By the fourth, only one person is there with the director. That’s because the man is not reliable.
He’s Mark Borchardt. He’s not got much education, or too much sophistication. But he loves movies. He’s as ready to reference Dawn of the Dead as The Seventh Seal and has something to say about both. But he gets less interesting the more he drinks, which he does copiously and on camera.
One of the most compelling things in American Movie is the contrast with Mark and his childhood friend, Mike Shank. Mike is a burnout. He speaks in monotone and doesn’t seem to process life in a straightforward way. But he’s off alcohol and drugs and plays guitar beautifully. He provides the film’s soundtrack. He is the cheerful companion to Mark’s wild flights of fancy, his ambitions, and unlikely possibilities.
Mark seems to think he will make the great American film. But he’s subject to fits of depression. He smokes too much weed, and drinks too much.
I found it fascinating that the film shows how fed up his entire family is with him. Nobody believes he’s going to make it. They’ve spent too much time with him, and seen what he can’t do. One of his brothers says he thinks it’s more likely Mark will end up a murderer than a filmmaker.
Eventually, Mark’s ambitious feature film is set aside, and he decides to complete a short film instead. This should fund his feature, because, of course, there’s such a large commercial market in 1997 for 35-minute-long films.
What’s stranger than this delusion is how infectious it is amongst his circle. They know Mark will fail, but they spend their time and money shoving him over the finish line. There’s a hilarious sequence where he picks up one of his childhood friends from jail, and immediately whisks him to the editing bay where they’re completing the short film, he thinks will be the foundation of his fortune.
The short film is Coven. Pronounced “Co-Ven,” not like the actual word, because Mark is mal educated. The short film is included in this release. It’s bad… but in a charming way. It is significantly better than dozens of low-budget trash films that clog the streaming services and used to be the main programming on Syfy. Coven has some memorable visuals, and an actual point of view. A hell of a lot of slop with infinitely bigger budgets released today can’t say that.
But American Movie isn’t really about filmmaking. It’s about the deficiencies, and the greatness, of the American Mid-West, as it existed 25 years ago. The people in this film aren’t quite degenerate, but there’s a lot of unhappiness in their living. But they could still make a living and be around and be interesting. I don’t know if that’s true in today’s over-financialized world.
I admired Mark in his full-blooded attempts to get his films made. But I never much liked him. He readily ran roughshod over his friends and family to get his extremely dubious vision made. There’s a telling scene where Mike tells the documentarians what he won’t tell his friends. He’s in a great mood because he (a gambling addict) won $50 on a scratcher. He’s elated, but he can’t tell anybody, because they’ll immediately ask to borrow it. It’s a cruddy parasitic world they all live in, where friendships are completely collateralized.
American Movie was filmed in 16mm with a 35mm blow-up. This 4K looks fantastic, within the limits of that technical background. It’s not a film that necessarily needs visual perfection. It’s appropriately grainy. It was also shot in Academy ratio, 4:3, so if you get mad that a movie doesn’t fill out your TV, prepare to get mad.
This documentary is a fascinating look into both an outsider artist’s process (and delusion of process) and a dissolved family’s methods of coping. Borchardt poured his anxiety into filmmaking. And, unfortunately, alcohol, so he’s never quite ready to grasp even his most minor opportunities. American Movie ends with the theatrical release of Mark’s not-very-good movie. But his real story doesn’t end because it’s a self-perpetuating one of alcoholism and addiction.
American Movie has been released on 4K UHD by Sony Picture Classics. Extras on disc include a commentary by the cast and crew, the short film Coven by subject Mark Borchardt, deleted scenes, and a trailer.
