The Diplomat (HBOGo)

The Diplomat is about the filmmaker’s father, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Immediately, it brings to mind numerous other personal essay documentaries about a filmmaker trying to come to terms with their own father, and Holbrooke has many of the flaws inherent to the genre: absenteeism, a job more important than family, and a sudden death that prohibited goodbyes to his family. You think you know exactly what kind of film this will be.

It is to the younger Holbrooke’s credit, though, that The Diplomat avoids almost all of these trappings. Holbrooke smartly understands that what is unique and fascinating about Richard Holbrooke’s story isn’t his personal life, or his lack of one, but his professional life, the bonds that he made there, and the history that he forged. With a series of talking heads ranging from major political figures to journalists to confidantes, Holbrooke paints a vivid picture of world politics over the past five decades. As the film travels from Vietnam to Washington to Bosnia to New York and finally settles in a still war-torn Afghanistan, The Diplomat masterfully walks us through major conflicts and political issues with ease and intelligence. At no time are we left lost by the politics of the film.

More importantly, though, The Diplomat masterfully walks us through the life and mind of Richard Holbrooke with ease and intelligence. It’s success rests solely in the mind of the Ambassador, and it never pulls back from probing deeper into what made him the great diplomat he was. We understand Holbrooke’s successes and failures, and the attributes and flaws that led to them. The Diplomat leaves you with a deeper understanding of not only our recent history, but what it takes to be a meaningful participant in that history.

The Wolfpack (Netflix)

The Wolfpack was one of the biggest hits coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and you can immediately understand why. It is a topic built for an audience of film lovers: a family of shut-in New Yorkers whose life revolves around watching movies and then recreating their favorites. It is rife with references, quotes and mimicry of the past forty years of filmmaking, from Reservoir Dogs to Batman Begins to Blue Velvet. The central characters, whose entire understanding of society and its norms has been taught to them through DVDs, seem to echo the dreams of every film lover who wishes that they had more time to live in the movies and less time to deal with the real world around them.

With such a ripe topic handed to her, first-time director Crystal Moselle misses her mark with The Wolfpack. While the film is entertaining enough on the surface, Moselle never tries to dig deep enough to give us a true picture of what life for the Angulo brothers is like. Every answer she gives only brings up fifteen more questions that she doesn’t bother to ask. There are entire other documentaries that could be made with the questions we miss: about the father’s choice to raise them like this, the sister that is glimpsed but never talked about, the mother who goes along with all of this dutifully, the choice of movies that the kids have taken to, the artistry the brothers put into re-creating costumes and sets, the psychiatric state the boys are in, and what it is like for them to walk into a movie theatre for the first time. Like the detailed movie recreations the brothers put on, The Wolfpack looks like a finished film but is missing all the nuance and emotion that leads you to understand something about the humanity on display.

Do I Sound Gay? (Netflix)

The question of the “gay voice” is one of those that seems tailor-made for documentary features. It is a question that everyone immediately understands, but that most of us have never really taken the time to think about. It is both visual and auditory. There is a history to the question, along with a more emotional component, and the possibilities for talking heads is innumerable. With all of that in its favor, it is sad that Do I Sound Gay? doesn’t work as well as a documentary as it should.

The biggest problem in Do I Sound Gay?, which is the directing debut of journalist David Thorpe, is that it is really two half-movies shoved together. The bulk of the film is Thorpe’s own story, in which he throws himself, Morgan Spurlock-style, into trying to find out if he does “sound gay” and then change his voice to something “straighter.” He counters this with the history of the gay voice and an attempt to find out the reasoning behind it. Neither side of the film gets anywhere; by the end, Thorpe hasn’t really told us why some people sound gay, nor does he really seem to have any sort of revelation about his own quest to straighten out his voice. The film feels like the documentary equivalent of a reporter’s notebook: a gathering of many different voices, opinions and facts that are now in need of someone to synthesize, or at least contextualize, them into a real examination.