Tell Them Who You Are [DVD]

Thank you, I received it very quickly and enjoyed receiving it. I collect Julia Robert Movies.

I am partial to those stories that really get at the heart of a family. Mark Wexler needed to do this film to work out his relationship with his parents. It worked. As you see this film forget that his father had a life where he worked with famous people. This story gets played out with most of us regular people. Worth seeing by all.

Haskell Wexler is one of a handful of cinematographers who have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, having won a pair of Oscars for filming "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "Bound for Glory." Other nominations came for "Matewan" and "Blaze." He was also nominated for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" along with Bill Butler, because Wexler was fired during the shoot. Two minutes into this documentary, you will understand why that would happen. You will also quickly figure out that this 2004 documentary is not about a great cinematographer, but about the relationship between Wexler and his son Mark, who is the one making the documentary.

The title of the film comes from Haskell Wexler's advice to his son when Mark started getting involved in the business. What it meant was tell people your father is Haskell Wexler. Born into a privileged life, Wexler got into making documentaries and established a reputation as a first-rate cinematographer and as an outspoken liberal. The son of Wexler's second wife, Mark talks about the point in his life when he realized that the U.S. government was bigger than his father and became a conservative, more out of a need to tick off his father than out of profound ideological conviction. That becomes part of the inherent tension between the documentarian and his subject (Wexler refuses to sign the release form for the film despite Mark's plea to trust him), but there is also the fact that Wexler thinks he knows more about making a documentary than his son. He probably does, but the old man (Wexler is in his early 80s), has no compunctions about communicating his superiority.

There are some clips from Wexler's films, both well-known ones like "In the Heat of the Night" and "Coming Home," and his lesser known and more political efforts, such as "The Bus" and "Introduction to the Enemy," both of which he directed. There are interviews with actors (e.g., Julia Roberts, Ron Howard), directors (e.g., Norman Jewison, George Lucas), producers (e.g., Michael Douglas), writers (e.g., Studs Terkel), and a few cinematographers (e.g., Conrad L. Hall). But time and time again the emphasis is more on the man than on his work, and because of Mark's presence the conversations often turn to the topics of fathers and sons, although with no small degree of irony it is Jane Fonda who makes the most pointed comments on the topic of fear to both Wexlers.

What is probably the most amazing thing about "Tell Them Who You Are" is that Mark Wexler would attempt to finally get out of his father's shadow by making a documentary about him. But clearly this sort of public exorcism is what the younger Wexler required. However, the portends are not good when he ignores his father's advice and makes a big mistake early on when filming his father's 80th birthday party. Still, the fact that this could be the final nail in the coffin for the relationship between these two is what makes the present as important as the past in this documentary.

One thing you need to know is that the payoff for this documentary comes not at the end, when we find what Haskell Wexler is going to do next, but on one of the DVD special features when his son finally shows him the documentary we have just watched. If you have any doubts about what "Tell Them Who Your Are" is all about, what you see (and hear) there will settle the matter. There are also uncut interview clips with several of the actors and cinematographers who appear in the documentary, with the Martin Sheen one being the most fascinating of the bunch as he speaks eloquently about fathers and sons.