DVD: Lost In La Mancha (Docudrama)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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Movie making is a practice of concentrated patience - of going ahead at full steam only to stop, to wait and to let a moment's magic unfold. Perhaps unfold, but we'll wait until the dailies come through, better said. I learned this first hand standing in heat pressing past one hundred degrees in remote Clackamas County Oregon while "locking down" the set. I was working on an independent feature film and it was my job to stand around in the secluded woods and assure the director, some twenty yards away through the briar, that nothing would ruin the integrity - run in front of or interrupt the audio recording - of a forty-five second shot.

And it took three hours to accomplish this.

Going on faith? I never saw the shot, nor did I hear one thing that would have muddied the sound. Four months later I still haven't seen any of it and probably won't even get a free DVD for my trouble. On a crew of nearly sixty, maybe five people saw what was actually making it onto film and we counted on that small group to relay details. The sweat of sixty people, nearly a third of them unpaid volunteers, all was shed in silence.

And in patience. And in the hopes that the sweltering, back breaking hours would come out successfully.

Knowing this first hand, watching the undoing of "Lost in La Mancha" killed me. It so sickened one director I know that for certain scenes, he had to leave the room. He's seen the movie second and third times, and still there are parts he can't watch. I'm sickened by the in-fighting - the gnashing teeth bared by petty producers ready to fire the Assistant Director for his inability to control the weather; he nearly doubled over by the sight of precious rented equipment floating down a washed out ravine.

The director I know has watched it a second and third time though, as have I, convincing me of the validity of a pet theory: we all love to watch a train wreck. People still care about Mike Tyson's bar fights; Liza Minella makes headlines; until the day he dies, someone will be tailing Michael Jackson. The fact of the matter is that no matter how disturbing anything is - relatable or not - there is an appeal to catastrophe. And if it is true that melodrama increases with the size of the problems presented, then "Lost In La Mancha" might be the most tragic film ever made. For anyone who has ever undertaken something - whether film or family dinner - the quick and merciless collapse of director Terry Gilliam's vision is gut wrenching. His efforts, however noble, constitute failure of epic proportion.

And all, perhaps, at the hand of God.

Or perhaps at the sweeping pen of an insurance company, but where really remains up to the viewer's discretion, as the search for culpability in a Quixotic undertaking constitutes the heart of "Lost In La Mancha."

© 2003 - Erick Mertz