I caught the new Chris Hegedus/Nick Doob documentary Al Franken: God Spoke yesterday, which made its premiere at Tribeca last night. I was really looking forward to this one, as I am big fan of both Hegedus and her husband, DA Pennebaker (who exec-produced); their pairing, from The War Room to startup.com, usually bodes well.
Al Franken: God Spoke follows Franken on his book tour for Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them through the launch of Air America, the left-wing radio station designed to "answer the fuckheads," into the 2004 election and the deflation of its aftermath. It's a structure that assumes that we are already fairly familiar with Franken as a comedian from his years at Saturday Night Live as well as his transition into "whatever I am now," as indeed he even has trouble defining it, although "flaming sword of justice" is tabled at one point.
You don't need to know of Franken, though, or even like him (and for future reference, should you ever want to silence a room full of your friends, the words "I think Al Franken is sexy" should do it) to get a kick out of his world-class chutzpah. A tireless whistleblower, he is shown eviscerating the republican agenda and the media outlets that grind it into pablum for the masses with a passion that politicians themselves have either lost or don't dare display. "The future belongs to those who are passionate and work hard," Franken quotes at one point, and it's a good maxim, but part of the film's poignancy is the hindsight you can't avoid no matter how much you adjust the mirrors.
There's some superb name-calling (in one clip Franken is called "a yappy, washed-up shitzu," with such vitriol that I cracked up at length) and great footage of Ann Coulter and Franken facing off in some sort pundit panel smackdown. When asked what figure in history she'd most like to be, the spidery Coulter (really, the girl beside me gasped when AC unfurled to full extension) said Joe McCarthy, or maybe FDR, so she could not implement The New Deal. Franken, agog, said he'd like to be Hitler, so he could call off the Holocaust and WWII, "but keep the Volkswagons."
My favorite segment was that of Franken attending a Newsweek party packed full of republicans, none of whom wanted him there. It's here that his scrappy outsider status is most obvious; he barely gets into the party, first of all, as the bouncer is convinced there's no way he was invited. Once inside, Franken's close to your worst nightmare as a guest, seeking out people like Henry Kissinger and Boyden Gray to mock with the kind of unselfconscious glee that makes him look slightly unhinged. He revels in the discomfort his presence causes, and refuses to be cowed. On the way home he mocks the grudging, blue-blooded accomodation of his hostess, Lally Weymouth.
In Canada we don't have ladies named Lally (or Lolly, for that matter, which is what I misheard), and I think we won our independence over a cup of tea, so I was a little dispirited (or re-dispirited) by the film's exposure of this country's deep, deep political divides; if anything it's an important reminder of the devious nature of some of those divides, a primer for media literacy. It's hard not to admire Franken's attempt to be the bigger blowhard if that's what it takes, and yet the dubious necessity of that strategy is itself saddening, especially in the wake of the knowledge that it didn't quite work. We learn a little of Franken's personal history, and SNL clips illustrate the political bent to his humor from way back. There's much to be said about a culture where the mantle for vital, populist debate falls upon, or is taken up by, or both, a satirist, or an entertainer, and Hegedus and Doob chronicle that strange state of affairs through Franken's struggle both to satirize and be taken seriously. The film concludes with Franken weighing the option of running for senator in Minnesota, a decision which still seems to be up in the air.
Hegedus and Doob adhere to the fly-on-the-wall, verite style that made Pennebaker famous back in the '60's, but the usual hope with that genre's high ratio of film shot to film used is that the story will present itself in the editing room. That can't really be the case here, as we all essentially know this story already, and at times it can seem like a "best-of" clip show, with cranky Franken hitting all of his usual marks. More than compensating for that, however, is the sheer force of Franken's personality in motion: his passion and his hard work, his binding admiration for the late senator Paul Wellstone, the way his Air America underlings can barely look him in the eye, his wife's ministrations to his every unfluffed pillow, the riffs on all the funny ways he can gloat after Kerry wins the election, his face as he watches the president accept his re-election. Rather than build a political vehicle or media expose, the film documents a small part of what seems like a good life, and a good fight.