Louis Theroux Tries To Film Scientologists & It Gets Weird, Because It's Louis Theroux

LOUIS THEROUX: MY SCIENTOLOGY MOVIE

The bluster of Scientology —its trillion-years sci-fi-pulp idiocy, its earnest mission to save the planet, its ceremonial pomp and circumstance, its Potemkin Village buildings, its endless campaigns of nuisance lawsuits and harassment— make it ripe for mockery. Louis Theroux, the bespectacled British journalist so well known his name shares co-billing in the title, seeks not to straight-up skewer scientology —its systematic oppression, its birth as a tax-scam, its monopolistic “business model”, its grand pyramid-scheme of purchased enlightenment— but sidle up to it, ironically out to engage with the “religion” knowing he’ll never be allowed to.

In My Scientology Movie, Theroux roughly resembles Hugh Grant in a rom-com: an Englishman Abroad, bumbling and dithering his way, ever so politely, into scenes of comic contrast. “Are you in the Sea Org?” he inquires, cheerily. “Can I deliver a letter, please?” he asks, at the gates of Gold Base, swiftly threatened with being arrested for daring to do so. In the face of his unassailable Englishness, the various Americans he crosses paths with come across as aggressive, obnoxious, entitled, righteous; be they Scientologists current or former.

“Guys, stick around, please,” he pleads, to a host of standover heavies who’ve come to ‘monitor’ the film’s proceedings, and are now going, as if they’re leaving the scene because Theroux’s committed some minor social faux-pas, and all this could just be talked out over tea. “Let’s just keep the conversation going!” he implores watchdog Catherine Fraser, who becomes unwitting participant and running character in the film; forever yelling at Theroux not to loiter outside Gold Base, the filmmaker peering through the razor-wire-topped, motion-detector-enabled fence that, as well as holding Sea Org members prisoner, keeps the filmmakers forever at a distance.

The squabbles with Fraser are childish: tit-for-tat exchanges of “Tell him to stop!” vs “You tell him to stop!” colouring absurdist moments in which Theroux films the Scientologists and vice-versa. The scenes play as comic critique of a secretive, righteous, litigious, paranoid cult, but they also address what becomes the documentary’s meta-theme.

My Scientology Movie is not a documentary expose of Scientology’s ills —for that, try Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief— but a discussion piece on the role of video in modern life, from cinema to the surveillance state. As the scenes in which the two opposing parties point cameras at each other pile up, the question becomes: who has the right to film other people, and what are they allowed to do with that footage?

The central subject of the film wants nothing to do with Theroux —he reads aloud their threatening legal correspondence periodically— so he, himself, becomes the on-screen protagonist. He pores over famous leaked Scientology videos (David Miscavige announcing L. Ron Hubbard’s death; Tom Cruise laughing maniacally re: KSW) as if searching them for clues, seeks out former cult-members for a chinwag, and eventually recruits ex-Scientology higher-up/hit-man Marty Rathbun —who’s every bit as combative as current Scientologists— as advisor on a series of dramatic recreations.

With the jauntily scored casting calls for actors to play Miscavige and Cruise, this movie-within-the-movie seems like a jolly-good lark, but as that production progresses, it too becomes a whole narrative about the power of the captured image; the need to make anew what one doesn’t already possess a sure symbol thereof. Theroux may end the film as if it’s a frustrated lament for a “church that’s been hijacked by its own pope”, but My Scientology Movie is moreso a study in what every documentary is, at essence, about: what happens when you point a camera at someone.

SULLY

Sully is a film based on a six-minute flight, in which a commuter plane, barely out of New York’s La Guardia airport, made a forced water-landing on the Hudson River, with all its passengers surviving. It was dubbed ‘the Miracle on the Hudson’, with its pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, hailed as a hero. This film —the 35th from director Clint Eastwood— is an earnest tribute to its lead character (played by Tom Hanks with snow-white dye-job), an ode to workplace competence and the earned skill of years on the job.

In many ways, it feels like familiar Eastwoodian stuff: old white man saves the day, comes under critique by naysayers (here, a safety-board, a bunch of smarmy dicks whose tribunal inquiry into the flight is a pearl-clutching attack on a Great American Hero), but ultimately emerges triumphant, his competence, scruples, and moral rectitude unquestionable. Eastwood recently called kids-these-days “the pussy generation”, and before he shuffles off this mortal coil, the 86-year-old is going to author one last grand tribute to the Greatest Generation. In text, this probably makes Sully sound like some grandfatherly nightmare, but fear not: there’s none of the crotchety-old-Republican bluster of Eastwood at his most problematic/repulsive (see: Gran Torino).

Instead, Sully comes blessed with a nimble, thoughtfully penned, artfully constructed screenplay from Todd Komarnicki, which tackles the central problem of the story —it’s a film based on a six-minute flight— by circling around the action, again and again; coming at it from different perspectives, in different ways, picking up and leaving off at different moments. By doing so, he manages to turn six minutes into a still-lean 96; the film constantly returning to action, and reaction, rather than settling in with character. Few characters, here, go beyond cut-out, but the lead performances by Hanks and Aaron Eckhart —the latter sporting an outlandish Tom Selleck moustache that you can practically hear bristle whenever he’s on-screen— manage to transcend the trappings by making their characters feel lived-in. Of course, each is a man out to do his job as best he can, making Eastwood uniquely sympathetic to them.

Oh, and, PS, if you can: leave as soon as Sully ends. Wanting to take the awful Prestige Picture ‘photos of the real people shown during the closing credits’ cliché even further, Eastwood stages a mini-behind-the-scenes documentary under the crawl. Here, the real-life Sully and real-life survivors are reunited in a glorified photo-op, and it’s so cravenly button-pushing, pandering, and crowd-pleasing that it knocks the whole film down a peg.

THE INFILTRATOR

Like your undercover-with-the-mob movies loud, flashy, and utterly generic? Well, here comes Bryan Cranston as the special agent who, in Miami in 1986, goes undercover to try and take down Pablo Escobar’s drug ring, and instead takes out his money-laundering operation and the BCCI bank. Want a jealous, nagging wife who laments that her husband has changed since he started hanging out with hoods, and who threatens to take the kids with her to her mothers’ house? Want a loose cannon who crosses the line, and endangers the mission, and seems a little too excited to be railing coke and fucking hookers? Want the seduction of money and power to test a man of mettle? Want a charismatic mobster who is more principled than the CIA, making the audience feel sympathetic to this getting-scammed anti-hero? Want a study of loyalty and betrayal? Want period dress-ups, from tacky modernist design to gaudy jewellery to men in loud suits? Want sub-Scorsese montages set to ’70s funk? It’s all here, just like you’ve seen it before.

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC

There’s a certain kind of Sundance formula that goes like this: come up with a wild premise, memorable character, dysfunctional family, or of-the-moment issue, and then send it on a road trip. This is, sadly, the case with Captain Fantastic, a film that has a handful of interesting ideas, but doesn’t know what to do with them. Here, Viggo Mortensen plays a back-to-the-land father who’s attempting to raise his six kids in a modern-day Plato’s Republic, teaching them socialist philosophy, a panoply of foreign languages, hunting skills, critical thought, self-sufficiency. It’s a rural fantasy for anyone who’s ever dreamed of dropping off the grid, raising kids outside of mediocre schooling, or being the World’s Greatest Dad: the kids on display, here, largely wondrous little intellectuals of bountiful curiosity and admiration for the paterfamilias.

But a rural idyll is bound to be shattered and, soon, the clan are sent off on a road trip into regular everyday America. Writer/director Matt Ross seethes with palpable revulsion at his own nation: in contrast with our hero and his gang of wild kids, everyone else is fat, stupid, complacent. A film with an actually radical worldview would seek to attack the systems of corruption, not those who merely in thrall to them, but Captain Fantastic never seems particularly radical. Instead, it’s a work of pure patriarchy: its chief showdown is between Mortensen and rich-Republican grandfather Frank Langella, and the only kids to get a real dramatic arc of their own eldest son George MacKay and angry neo-adolescent rager Nicholas Hamilton.

Viewers are, in theory, supposed to debate whether Mortensen is a glorified cult leader or a true visionary, but the film never commits to the conversation: its mock-ironic comic-book title seeming more and more earnest as it goes on; the film only growing more sentimental and formulaic as it does. Captain Fantastic is being marketed as if it’s a work of counter-cultural spirit but, for a film that apparently abhors late-period capitalism, it sure feels like a market-tested cinematic product.

LA BELLE SAISON

A slice of sunkissed, non-threatening arthousery from Catherine Corsini, La Belle Saison finds Izïa Higelin as a country lass who falls into the budding feminist movement, and into bed with Cécile de France, in 1971 Paris. The film begins as yet another slice of cinematic Baby Boomer nostalgia and radical-chic dress-ups: all bell bottoms and bra-burning, peace and love and campus sedition.

But the screenplay —from Corsini and Laurette Polmanss— tilts from protest-nostalgia-piece to work of rural realism, as it moves from Paris to a dairy-farm in the countryside. There, Higelin has returned, out of duty, to run the family farm; de France, eventually, following her. The new setting is a test of their metropolitan relationship but also their commitment: to each other, to their transgressive relationship, to their political beliefs. The film is, ultimately, about the conflict between individual desires and greater social values; a minor matinée riff on still-timely themes.