The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘A Married Couple’ (1970)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel.
Before PBS broke ground in the concept of reality television with “An American Family” in 1973, Canada gave the world “A Married Couple,” the director Allan King’s portrait of Billy and Antoinette Edwards, a husband and wife in Toronto who committed their squabbles to celluloid. King practiced his version of the noninvolvement school of documentary making, a style that is often imprecisely lumped under the labels “cinéma vérité” and “direct cinema.” (There was even a bit of a documentary exchange program at the time: William Brayne, the cinematographer on King’s “Warrendale” and “Come on Children,” shot some of Frederick Wiseman’s contemporaneous films, including “Law and Order,” “Hospital” and “Juvenile Court.”)
Reviewing “A Married Couple” in The New York Times, Vincent Canby complained of the “unreality” the camera introduced in the couple’s behavior. The film, he wrote, while acknowledging that factor, “proceeds to pass off this conscious performance as some kind of meta-truth that is neither fact nor fiction.” But the performative aspect of the film is part of what makes it so fascinating. Are Antoinette and Billy, unselfconscious about sharing intimate details and even appearing unclothed with the camera rolling, natural exhibitionists, or is the existence of a movie changing their relationship? Are their endless arguments — about money, their sex life, the car (oh, that car) — the whole story, or has editing painted them in a particular light? (The number of uninterrupted takes suggests otherwise.) Their dog, Merton, and young son, Bogart, come off like bystanders at a natural disaster. Even the pair’s efforts at reaching a détente turn into new fights. When Billy, an ad man, superciliously pitches a new program of “emotional cleanliness” for the two of them, the conversation quickly shifts to Antoinette’s (justified, from what we see) complaints about Billy’s efforts to mold her.
Yet King also captures them in more complicated moments of intimacy. Not much later in the film, Antoinette cries as she and Billy listen to “The Magic Flute,” and the camera pulls back on their embrace, only to zoom in again as they whisper inaudibly to each other. King then dissolves from this scene of skintight affection to show them in separate bedrooms. The emotional volatility has been likened to that in John Cassavetes’s films, and Billy and Antoinette’s exchanges have a similar absurdist quality. “What we don’t know is whether we really hate one another or not,” Billy says near the end, in a diagnosis of their marriage. And as Antoinette picks at his chest hair and he strokes her nose, “A Married Couple” hints at a connection that a camera can’t see.
‘Capturing the Friedmans’ (2003)
Another milestone in the history of dysfunctional families on film, Andrew Jarecki’s investigative documentary turned 20 this year, and it holds up — which is another way of saying that it’s difficult to watch it without wearing a Hazmat suit. While “Capturing the Friedmans” belongs, superficially, to the legal genre (Jarecki went on to make the miniseries “The Jinx,” about Robert Durst, the real-estate scion who was convicted of murder after offering something vaguely like a confession while mic’d for the movie), the copious home video footage that the Friedmans shot of themselves vaults it into its own category.
The movie presents the case against Arnold Friedman, a teacher in Great Neck, N.Y., and one of his sons, Jesse. In 1988, both pleaded guilty to charges of sexual abuse; the acts had allegedly occurred while they were holding computer classes at their home. But the film’s suggestion is that while Arnold, who died in 1995 in prison, was guilty of possessing child pornography and had confessed to abusing other boys, the case’s contentions about the computer classes lacked plausibility and physical evidence, and that Jesse, who was released in 2001, was innocent. The film methodically argues that the accusations against them — some of which have been recanted or disputed by the accusers — resulted from mishandled interrogations and community hysteria. A model of dialectical editing, “Capturing the Friedmans” again and again presents an interviewee who appears to be credible, only to undermine that person the moment it cuts to someone else.
Over the years, Jarecki has continued to press to clear Jesse’s name, but “Capturing the Friedmans” doesn’t merely endure as a work of advocacy. In the film, Debbie Nathan, a journalist who took up the Friedmans’ cause, says that other families facing similar accusations were much stronger and banded together. The movie shows that the Friedmans, by contrast, fell apart. And Jesse’s brother David, in particular, picked up a video camera. “Maybe I shot the videotape so that I wouldn’t have to remember it myself,” David says of the night before Jesse’s plea.
‘The Conductor’ (2022)
A different sort of troubled-marriage drama from “A Married Couple,” Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” examines the career of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) through the prism of his relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan).
But another way to understand Bernstein’s influence is to watch “The Conductor,” a documentary about Bernstein’s protégée Marin Alsop, who became the first woman to lead one of the United States’s major orchestras, in Baltimore, where her appointment initially faced resistance from the musicians. Alsop was also quite transparently an inspiration for Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár in “Tár,” even though that film’s dialogue plays down the connection by having Tár name Alsop as a contemporary. As Zachary Woolfe wrote in The Times last year: “Alsop, like Tár, is a lesbian with a partner and a child. And like Tár, she founded a fellowship program for young women seeking to follow in her footsteps. Unlike Tár, Alsop has never been accused of misconduct, with the fellows or otherwise.”
“The Conductor,” directed by Bernadette Wegenstein, is, in fact, an introduction to Alsop as a force for good in the world of classical music, a tradition-bound milieu that still hasn’t entirely shaken off the sexist notion that women aren’t capable of conducting. Alsop was rejected from Juilliard’s conducting program twice and often had to make her own opportunities, including starting her own orchestra. She is also shown as a devoted teacher to young musicians. The film observes as she leads master classes (she tells students preparing to conduct Beethoven’s Fifth to act like they’re confronting a bear); as she gives Skype lessons to women training to conduct; and as she watches performances by Baltimore schoolchildren who have taken part in a program she founded.
The film includes old video of Alsop and Bernstein together at Tanglewood, and she still recalls him fondly, although it sounds like even he had his hidebound attitudes. She remembers one instance in which he expressed being almost confused by her conducting. “When I close my eyes, I can’t tell you’re a woman,” she recalls him saying. Her reply? “Well, listen, if you’re more comfortable with your eyes closed, I’m good with that,” she says.
Later in the film, she adds, “The thing that terrified people so much about Bernstein in the classical-music world was his insistence on breaking the rules and his insistence that art should not be elitist.” “The Conductor” shows how Alsop has continued and broadened his legacy for others, even while carving out and securing a place in music history that is all her own.
