Two very different documentaries that find common ground in similar themes, to varying ends.
What did the late film director John Schlesinger and the late popstar George Michael have in common? Both were native Londoners raised around Hampstead, gay men with self-image issues and big dreams, celebrated for early works about the proletariat and the morés of the emerging youth culture, eventually going Hollywood and having to balance mass-scale success and creative vision and how to exist around the deeply ingrained homophobia of their times. Two new documentaries about (respectively) Schlesinger’s most enduring hit and Michael’s supernova soulboy duo, Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy and the Netflix release Wham!, take quite different approaches to this shared ground, to varying ends.
Desperate Souls (dir: Nancy Buirski) adapts Glenn Frankel’s book Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic into a feature film. The 1969 Midnight Cowboy itself is Schlesinger adapting material, first of a 1969 novel by James Leo Herlihy and then directed from Waldo Salt’s screenplay. I haven’t read Frankel’s book or the Herlihy novel, so I can’t add insight there. But when I read about this documentary, I was ready to devour it: Schlesinger has long been a fascination of mine, as are scuzzy old New York, Dustin Hoffman, the emotional intimacy of platonic male friendships, and queerness and codedness and the American obsession with broad archetypes and the thin sheath of latex separating the modern from the postmodern. Desperate Souls aims to plumb these depths.
But the problem with trying to get all this into a relatively straightahead two-hour doc? You can’t. This is not a single-subject movie, but it’s packaged as one; it’s trying to jam like six disparate threads through its needle-eye. It may very well succeed as a book! But as I was watching I kept thinking it should be a limited-series podcast that tackles each part discretely. Or a narrative arc of a full Schlesinger podcast. I want everything that’s in here. It is all compelling as fuck. I love that we get the renowned cultural critic-historian Lucy Sante as a dazzled fangirl and I love that we get Jon Voight recounting his boyish schemes to be taken in earnest as an art-cinema actor and the stories of him cozying up to Abbie Hoffman! But in the format Desperate Souls is in currently, it’s all too scattered.
Meanwhile, Wham! (dir: Chris Smith) stays laser-focused on its subject, to the extent it ends when the duo does, with only a passing nod to George Michael’s subsequent solo stardom and untimely death. It’s a drawback for some viewers, but I am okay with it because as a group Wham! were a momentary snapshot and Smith’s doc feels like a snapshot of that snapshot. It doesn’t shy away from discussing George Michael’s sexuality and his gravitational drift from his best mate Andrew Ridgeley as the former continued to develop as an artist and individuate as a human, but it’s buoyed by the thrill of club hits, Top of the Pops, MTV mania, global adoration, getting high on ones own supply. And it stays afloat through a canny combination of taut scripting/editing, a minimalist interviewing strategy (it’s generally just Ridgeley, in voiceover, a similar move to the Sinead O’Connor doc Nothing Compares), and enough trust in the archival material and the strong narrative voice to never default to vibe-draining static B-roll visuals or the now-cliché trope of someone futzing with a clip-on mic or pulling ephemera from boxes. The chapters as such are arranged on a timeline matching Ridgeley’s mum’s copiously kept scrapbooks of the Wham! heyday, but we don’t need to see Mum onscreen to sense her love. It’s all in what she saved.
And yet it is telling to show a moment or two of George Michael’s father. We hear tell of him discouraging and casting aspersions on the singer-songwriter and eventual producer’s musical ambitions. The socially conservative dad was so looming a figure of judgment that multiple people in Michael’s orbit urged the rising star not to come out to the man. Cut to: an interview clip displaying immense pride at the son’s myriad accomplishments, natch. Does it dwell? Nah, it doesn’t need to. Point made.
But if my headcanon for Desperate Souls has its own podcast series, a Wham! podcast can use the time to go long on the cutting-room sweepings left over from this documentary’s exceptionally lean mean machine.
