Director: Alex Gibney
Cast: Lawrence Wright, Mark Rathbun, Monique Rathbun, Mike Rinder
Have I Seen it Before: It feels like I may have seen some of it before. Those scenes that dealt with the harassment of ex high-ranking members of Scientology. I may very well have flipped to HBO at some instant and stuck with it for a moment, while it may even be possible that I had seen the whole thing and forgotten it. Is that something that just happens in your 40s? If only there were some kind organized method of making the brain better…
Did I Like It: I kid, I kid. And I do so only partially because I saw that the church went after people who wrote reviews. I imagine a decade on, they’re probably not looking to close at the chatter, but one can never be too careful.
One can’t argue with the form on display here. It’s hard to believe that the church didn’t have a role in preventing it from getting a Best Documentary nomination. But as I’ve often determined, craft is secondary in the field of documentary. An array of stumbling amateurs can mangle the format, but for the skilled, it becomes a question of access and point of view.
The film has the benefit of adapting its perspective from the similarly title book, and therefore has more focus than most.
Access, however, is always going to be the tricky part when Scientology is concerned. The film makes the point that they certainly tried to get the perspective of figures like John Travolta, Tom Cruise, and especially David Miscavige, but to naturally not get any cooperation. Given their secretive nature (to put it mildly) that’s not terribly surprising, but it does leave the possibility of the truly great Scientology documentary has yet to be made. Maybe it will take years. Probably most of the people I just mentioned will have either left the church or died. It may even take the end of Scientology for the full, strange picture to be there.
When that documentary is made, one doesn’t have a hard time imagining that filmmaker using piece of this film as a foundation, and probably even a good amount of b-roll.