DIEGO MARADONA
★★★1/2
From the makers of Senna and Amy, here comes another portrait-via-archival-footage documentary that lands squarely between the two. Diego Maradona is a contemporaneous retelling of sporting glory, and a chronicle of a cocaine-addled downfall. It’s a psychological profile of someone trapped in a realm of celebrity, and a plea for a sense of empathy. There’s humble beginnings, home videos, press conferences, paparazzi stakeouts, media circuses, moments of grand global success, and, ultimately, tragedy. And, behind it all, there’s director Asif Kapadia, who has mastered working within this cinematic niche; considering the trio of films to form a singular trilogy.
Whilst Kapadia’s fondness for replaying sporting-events as if the results aren’t known can be frustrating — spoiler alert: Argentina won the 1986 World Cup — his ability to isolate moments of seemingly-mundane video as tool interrogating the psychological state of his subject is fantastic.
One of the most telling sequences in Diego Maradona shows its titular soccer-star at a 1990 Christmas Party for his club, Naples. Coming at a time in which Maradona has been made a villain in Italy (largely due to knocking Italy out of the 1990 World Cup), it finds him sitting by himself, isolated and unhappy. He’s stuck in a situation he can’t get out of; in a wild yarn co-starring the Camorra, countless coke-benders, and the possessiveness of a club ‘owning’ a player. The video watches on, silently, as this whirlwind of a man — on pitch and off — is stilled, rendered inert by poor decisions closing in on him, trapped in a dream that’s turned nightmare.
As with Senna, there’s the stuff of childhood prodigy, of iconoclasm, of battling against sporting bureaucracy, of being a poor kid from South America storming of the summit of sporting success. As with Amy, there’s the juiciness of scandal, addiction, bad decisions, shady characters, downward spirals; and the slow, creeping feeling of sadness and complicity, as a person is destroyed as much by celebrity culture as chemical substances.
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What ultimately arises is a keenly-observed portrait of a flawed person; someone worshipped like a God but ultimately all-too-mortal. Here, obsessiveness is the whetstone that sharpens sporting skills, but also the millstone that drags a sporting hero down into the depths of addiction. Whilst it’s a fine work of storytelling, Diego Maradona is yet another cinematic shrine to the glories of being blessed with a vast archive. All the intimate, incriminating videos, herein, are what really allow Kapadia to do away, entirely, with the dreaded talking-heads that plague most documentaries. Sticking to its in-the-moment footage, there’s a strong experiential quality, increasing the urgency of the story, and letting it escape from feeling like a history lesson. Even if history is pretty clear on who won the 1986 World Cup.
THE GREAT HACK
★★★
Making their Oscar-winning portrait of the Arab Spring in Egypt, 2013’s The Square, documentary-makers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim showed how the banal social media platforms of the digital world could be used to foment revolution, and throw off the shackles of totalitarianism. Six years on, their latest film, The Great Hack, almost feels like some grand mea culpa; an acknowledgement at their naïveté. The social media platforms of the digital world have been increasingly used to disrupt the democratic process, providing a place in which totalitarianism can flourish.
This documentary is, broadly, Amer and Noujaim’s investigation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the company was found to have data-mined, data-scraped, and pretty much virtually entrapped countless citizens into creating psychological self-profiles that could be sold off to, say, tin-pot politicians looking to swing elections by any means necessary. The film follows three key subjects intimately involved in the case: quasi-whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, a former CA employee; investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr; and David Carroll, a professor who took CA to court to have his data returned.
The Great Hack manages to marry both intimate small-scale on-the-ground footage with big picture ideas, but two hours is hardly enough to wrestle with the true scope of the weaponisation of big data. When there’s a chronicle of CA starting an anti-voting campaign meant only to sway election results in Trinidad & Tobago in 2009, this feels like a story worthy of its own documentary. And Cadwalladr mentions, off-hand, that the use of disinformation and propaganda is essentially psy-ops, the phrase, and the repercussions of the notion, are left to linger.
What’s left is, instead, a general survey of the horror show of online living. And, for viewers, a growing feeling of dispiriting unease, a gnawing hollowness at our complicity in this system. After all, watching The Great Hack on the streaming service showing it is essentially colluding in this grand gathering of data. The fact that the film’s making, and its consumption, is inextricable from its subject is its own alarm. It’s an entertainment product that’s a sad reminder we’re living in a digital-age epoch that Carroll calls, all too memorably, “the death of human dignity”.
DEFEND, CONSERVE, PROTECT
★★1/2
A much-less-complicated subject, and documentary, comes with Defend, Conserve, Protect. There’s no ethical grey areas or reasonable differences or complex theories when it comes to Japan’s ongoing pursuit of commercial whaling. But Stephen Amis’s film takes that as a sign to make a film that lacks any kind of cinematic complexity.
Instead, it follows various Sea Shepherd vessels as they journey into Antarctic waters in attempts at disrupting Japanese whaling ships from their illegal slaughter of sea life for ‘scientific’ purposes. It’s mounted as a heroic, David-vs-Goliath battle, the high seas cat-and-mouse games and action movie tone making you feel as you’re in some cinematic redux of Master & Commander. The intrusive, instructive score — thundering drums for mounting tension, tinkling pianos for moments in which a whale has died — that hammers home simplicity with simplicity.
This makes for a film that feels at once profound and pat, urgent and flaccid. Defend, Conserve, Protect is a prime exemplar of a documentary whose intentions should not be confused with its execution. 5 stars for sentiment, 2.5 for the movie.
