**½/****
directed by Teller

by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at
a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer
paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison
as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes
Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his
photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates
the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his
little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a
Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads
weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that
the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality
problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of
science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of
self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled
in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction,
and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous:
how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?

****/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns
to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a
feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The
Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored
in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael
Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would
be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and
an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld
comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable
self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing
the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an
initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself
speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like
that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't
mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the
popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations.
When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening–an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human
emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick
reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has
made, all the more timely now that the United States–under new leadership, elected
on a platform of hope and change–is on the eve of another act of war.