Avi Belkin (2019)
The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes has aired continuously on US primetime television for longer than any other programme. Mike Wallace, one of the original presenters when 60 Minutes began in 1968, stayed with it nearly forty years and, on the evidence of Israeli-born Avi Belkin’s documentary feature, is a legendary figure in American TV history. I can’t say I’d never heard of him because I’ve seen Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999). This dramatises events around the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand’s interview on 60 Minutes in 1995; Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer) is a significant character in the story. That’s as much as I knew about him, though. Belkin’s film is full of familiar faces from American news and show business journalism – Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson, Larry King, to name just a few – but I struggled, to an extent that went beyond cultural outsiderness, to get a handle on Mike Wallace Is Here. By the end, I’d learned some facts about Wallace without knowing much more about what made him tick. My near-bewilderment in the early stages was down to unfamiliarity with some of the people on the screen, a problem compounded by Belkin’s style. The film’s eventual so-whatness is the result of its director’s lack of a coherent perspective on his subject.
Documentaries differ widely in how they identify the people in them. At one extreme, a caption appears on screen to explain who we’re seeing each time we see them. Belkin, whose film is almost entirely archive footage and eschews narrative voiceover, is at the other extreme. Except when the name of Wallace’s interviewee is part of the clip being used, it’s up to viewers to know who they’re watching: most of the contributors aren’t named until the closing credits. It’s a striking approach given that Belkin isn’t a native American and is young (not quite forty); some of the faces on the archive film surely couldn’t have been known to him in advance. (He might argue that it’s the interviewer, not his interlocutor, who matters here, though the clips are rarely long enough to convey the sustained impact of Wallace’s reputedly hard-hitting style of questioning.) Belkin is fond of a split screen to juxtapose talking heads or show Wallace at different stages of his long life (1918-2012). Even though a good deal of the archive material comes from the early days of television, the effect of these images, which come and go rapidly, is akin to a viewing habit from a later stage of TV’s evolution (or regression). It feels like channel-hopping.
At the start of Mike Wallace Is Here, an elderly Wallace is in heated conversation with Bill O’Reilly, the (ex-)star turn of Fox News. Wallace says O’Reilly’s noisy hectoring of interviewees isn’t journalism; O’Reilly responds by claiming, to Wallace’s obvious discomfort, that the latter inspired his interviewing style. In footage from the 1980s of a moderated discussion involving different kinds of journalist, Wallace is offended when a man from the Wall Street Journal deprecates his 60 Minutes performances as having little to do with journalism – though he laughingly gives Wallace interviews high marks for ‘drama’ and entertainment value. These two clips point to significant themes in the documentary, neither of which is explored fully. Belkin does little to pursue the idea that Wallace paved the way for the likes of O’Reilly or the WSJ man’s dismissal of him as a show-business phenomenon.
The latter characterisation is nevertheless a reminder of the remarkable range of Wallace’s early broadcasting career, which Belkin does describe. He appeared on TV as a game-show host and panellist, and also as an actor, appearing in commercials both as himself and playing a character. He seemed determined to get into television, no matter how. Although he made a name in the mid-1950s on Night Beat, a late-late-interview-show broadcast in New York City, by the early 1960s his main income came from fronting a series of cigarette ads. It was after the death in Greece of his nineteen-year-old son (Belkin’s film includes footage of the funeral – I wasn’t clear how this had come to be shot) that Wallace resolved to concentrate on serious current affairs journalism.
When he joined the CBS news team in early 1963, it’s implied that some of his eminent colleagues viewed him as a lightweight opportunist. Perhaps he simply matured; in any case, a remarkable feature of Mike Wallace Is Here is that he’s most impressive conducting interviews with Ayatollah Khomeini, during the hostage crisis in the US Embassy in Tehran, and Vladimir Putin, circa 2005. Wallace shows real nerve in both of these. He was eighty-seven when he interviewed Putin, who, at the outset, seems ready to patronise him as a harmless old chap. When Wallace’s questioning quickly proves otherwise, Putin is startled; it takes a few moments for him to regain his psychopathic poise.
Belkin’s film is a good deal less than the sum of its many individually fascinating parts. An interview with a thirty-nine-year-old Donald Trump is close to astonishing: his appetite for inane mantra is already discernible but he’s borderline articulate and his complexion suggests the real world rather than cartoon illustration. Trump doesn’t even need to appear, though, to make you doubtful about one of the persisting implications of Mike Wallace Is Here. At the end of his broadcasting life in 2008, Wallace may well have seen himself as representative of a vanishing tradition of tough but honourable TV journalism, and fair enough. Avi Belkin’s nostalgic use of this conception of Wallace feels, in 2019, a bit too easy and predictable.
30 May 2020
