Educational Media Reviews Online

You're eight years old and since you've long decided to be a filmmaker, you're already making super-eight movies with your best friend Paul - he's the funny photogenic kid next door playing the gangster who dies in a hail of virtual bullets and ketchup blood. Twenty years later you take along a more sophisticated camera when you visit Paul in prison where he is serving time, for the second time, for bank robbery. Paul's no longer the charming boy you knew years ago. A wild look now pervades his eye, a compulsive quality animates his talk - in fact, the prison psychiatrist has diagnosed him as manic depressive, and he'll almost certainly call on you for help when he regains his freedom.

A novel written by a clinical psychologist? A sketch for a surefire feature film starring Dustin or Tom or Sean? No, a true story, and the subject of the riveting film that fell into the lap of documentary filmmaker Jonathan Berger. Together with some of that childhood footage (the contrast between the boyishly exuberant Paul and his distraught demented adult self breaks the heart) and interviews with, among others, Paul's mother (after a nasty cocaine episode, she refuses to let him into her home ever again), the film recounts the few days Paul and Jonathan spend together in New York after Paul's prison release. The portrait it presents of an emotionally disturbed person and of the loyal friendship between filmmaker and felon that survives into disillusioned adulthood is unforgettable. Actually, Paul has broken the conditions of his parole by leaving the Massachusetts halfway house in which he was ordered to stay. Jonathan and Paul desperately try without success to find Paul a decent, reasonable place to live. Jonathan refuses to let Paul stay in his own tiny apartment as he judges Paul to be very troubled mentally - as he evidently is. Among the film's most poignant moments is a scene in which Paul succumbs to an inner anguish that transfigures his face (Jonathan's voice-over narration tells us that seconds later he ordered the cameras shut, the scene being too painful to film). Indeed the film is so moving that we easily forgive Jonathan some narrative gimmickry (presumably he's in the middle of abortively writing some Gothic screenplay when Paul calls) and dissimulation (given the omnipresent camera, the idea of making the film must certainly have occurred to him earlier than he acknowledges). Eventually, though, Paul returns to his halfway house where, we are told, he remains still. Meanwhile, the film's two very real protagonists linger in the imagination - the one succeeding (at least for now) in a childhood ambition, the other overwhelmed by the ravages of mental disease.