A+ on the Caro/Gottlieb doc
My first great watch of 2023 is Lizzie Gottlieb’s “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro & Robert Gottlieb,” about an enduring and often thorny writer-editor relationship between two giants of literature.
Caro has written the legendary “late-midcentury NYC and how it got that way” urban planning deep-dive “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” (1974) and the still-in-progress five-volume series on Lyndon Johnson, all under Gottlieb’s editorial marshal. Gottlieb’s resume begins with him editing Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” finds him running Knopf and eventually has him at the top of The New Yorker’s masthead. Both guys are alive, quite accomplished, quite old, and determined to finish the LBJ project, in due time, and don’t ask them about when. Lizzie Gottlieb is the editor’s daughter; she comes out of Off-Broadway theater and has directed two other feature films.
As films, documentaries don’t always excite me. They can be too flat or too zany or too fan-servicey. And when there’s a family member directing, it’s a crapshoot.[1]
Lizzie Gottlieb gets the hell out of the way, which I appreciate. She’s in “Turn Every Page” as a minor presence, sometimes heard asking a question or called into focus when Caro refers to “your father,” but she knows where the real meat is and lets these men talk. As a theater person, she knows how to use the small scale as a kind of art material, and how to make the most of formal limitations. Caro and the elder Gottlieb initially didn’t want to be filmed together, so Lizzie shot the bulk of their interviews as monologues, to the point where it feels jointly conspiratorial when the men finally relent at the end to let the camera in as they roll up their sleeves together at the publishing office to commence poring over LBJ pages.
The cinematography (by Mott Hupfel; amazing name) is creative and stimulating, with aerial cityscapes that allow for the same kind of awe Caro expresses for idealism and power and their dangers. The editing (Molly Bernstein, Kristen Nutile) is alert but not excessively quick-cut, which matches the personalities of these nonagenarians whose faculties are sharp but who tend to shun “devices” and work with pencils and typewriters. Lizzie understands that the crew’s various roles are as necessary in conveying and reflecting ideas as she and her subjects are.
The other smart “address it very briefly and get it out of the way” bit of this doc is the cultural magnitude of “The Power Broker” itself. Lizzie is right, of course, to include the voices of academics, activists, and established publishing figures (excellent to see Pantheon/Schocken’s Lisa Lucas represented as a champion) who testify to the book’s continuing relevance and potency. But she’s also right not to dwell on that Covid-era phenomenon of cable news interviewees, whether renowned experts or just mediocre salaryman politicians, with their webcams pointed just-so that the bookshelf right behind their head has the “Power Broker” spine sticking out. It’s a curious artifact of our times, but ugh I hate it.
She’s intuitive about when to hold our hands, reminding us, as newspapers do a few grafs down, who someone is when it’s been a while and we might have forgotten — there’s no “wait, who is this guy again?” because she captions recurring speakers multiple times, and that does matter. And I actually loved that a speaker used the word “sitzfleisch” and there was no cutaway to a definition. Nope, none. Lizzie trusts us to pick up on the ample context clues of the Yiddish-English oral tradition, and to treat it as musicality.
Anyway, gauntlet thrown, smack in the middle of January’s perennial cinema doldrums.
