Henry Fonda was inarguably one of the greatest actors ever produced by the United States. The Austrian filmmaker Alexander Horwath pushes this self-evident truth further in his purposefully expansive documentary “Henry Fonda for President.” The movie convincingly posits that Fonda was, cinematically, the embodiment of America itself.
Horwath has gathered a vast amount of archival material from film, television, radio and more to make his case. We hear not just from Fonda himself, but from Peter and Jane, the Fonda children who followed in Henry’s professional footsteps.
But the fulcrum from which Horwath mostly focuses his view of Fonda is a 1981 interview with the journalist Lawrence Grobel for Playboy magazine; Horwath plays sections of the tape throughout. Fonda sounds in rough shape, his distinctive Midwestern twang subsumed by rasp. He’s also in a bad mood. His crankiness is bracing and sad. He would die the next year.
The movie travels across the United States, taking us to significant places in both Fonda’s life and filmography, beginning with the actual village of Fonda in upstate New York. Henry was a descendant of that town’s founder, who was killed and scalped in a raid by the Mohawk tribe there.
Horwath concludes that Fonda is playing his own ancestor in John Ford’s “Drums Along the Mohawk.” The documentary later shows Robert De Niro’s mohawk haircut in “Taxi Driver,” threading that with an old TV ad in which Fonda extols the virtues of a viewer toy to that film’s co-star Jodie Foster. These connections have plentiful entertainment value, but Howarth knows they signify more than just trivia: Their threads make up the fabric of American culture, such as it is.
Henry Fonda for President
Not rated. Running time: 3 hours 4 minutes. In theaters.
