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Review: 'Fast, Cheap & Out of Control' well-paced, well-done
September 4, 1997
Web posted at: 10:46 p.m. EDT (0246 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- If you aren't familiar with the work of director Errol Morris, you should do yourself a huge favor. His latest movie, "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" is far-and-away the most challenging film of 1997. Morris is a brilliant, iconoclastic documentarian whose approach to "facts" (as we're used to seeing them in the conventional filmmaking sense) is a highly unique mixture of specifics, his own far-reaching sense of humanity and the absurd, and a love for the seemingly warped thought processes of highly emotional eccentrics.
Morris first came to national prominence in 1988 when his film "The Thin Blue Line" set the wheels of justice in motion to get Randall Adams, a Texan incorrectly convicted for the murder of a police officer, released from jail. Morris then managed to top this amazing film with "A Brief History of Time," which deals with the very existence of God, through the mind-bending work, and tragic life, of astro-physicist Stephen Hawking.
"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" never quite reaches the dazzling heights of these two masterworks, but Morris can be forgiven for not hitting a home run every time he steps up to the plate. He continually displays a massive and (in these sad days of cookie-cutter movie making) near-heroic amount of ambition that makes complete thematic success a negligible concern.
Morris himself calls "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" the "ultimate low-concept movie -- a film that utterly resists the possibility of a one-line summary." Morris weaves together the stories of four different men who display an obvious passion for their chosen fields of endeavor, all of which have to do, in one way or another, with wild animals.
Dave Hoover is an animal trainer who idolizes the late circus baron Clyde Beatty, and tries to carry on Beatty's tradition of lion and tiger acts.
George Mendonca is a topiary gardener who has spent his life maintaining a vast landscape full of hedges that he has twisted and cut to look like a menagerie of animals, everything from a giraffe to a bear.
Ray Mendez is obsessed with mole rats, odd "near-cold-blooded mammals" that live their lives as if they're insects.
And, finally, there's Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who has designed and built autonomous robot insects that can crawl around like bugs without any advanced instructions from a human controller.
If that all sounds completely off the wall, it is, and Morris knows it, but he picks through the information gleaned from interviews with these men to develop a heartfelt meditation on the nature of human existence, and to explore the possibility that, as certain ways of life die out (the gardener and the lion tamer), humans may be rudely awakened by more highly-adaptable replacement beings (insect robots and mole rats.) If you think you'd be inclined to giggle at a lot of this, by all means feel free. Morris' safety valve is a warped sense of humor that continually bubbles beneath the surface of his stories, serving not to undermine the protagonists' obsessions, but to draw them closer to our own hearts.
Morris frames a lot of the sequences with an old 1930s serial starring the actual Clyde Beatty, as he fights Hollywood-contrived "jungle natives" and searches for a mystical lost city. Beatty's quest is hilarious in its filmmaking ineptitude, but it draws a direct parallel to the seemingly absurd quests of Morris' interview subjects.
Morris has an impressive ability to find the connective tissue between wildly different topics, whether it be through visual, verbal, or implied-theoretical information. Talk of how mole rats work together like ants to perform their daily tasks is intercut with robot bugs scurrying across a rocky landscape and circus acrobats performing highly precise tumbling stunts. The point is that the mutual dependence of life forms on our planet is not the cut-and-dried matter that we'd like to imagine. Human beings are just another cog in the machine, and, when we aren't looking, other creatures (some of which we've devised ourselves) are quickly gaining ground on us. This troubling information slowly begins to permeate the fabric of the film. As it's pointed out at one juncture, "Everything is not cute. That's not life."
As the film progresses, we see the danger in these conflicting entities, as the more hazardous aspects of our earthly struggle come into focus. One of Morris' most unique gifts is that he can wring emotion from images that are, on the surface, fairly ambivalent. It's a sad moment when a snowstorm damages the gardener's prized "giraffe," as well as when we're shown a movie serial electrocution of a charmingly ineffectual marauding "robot." Those quotation marks around "giraffe" and "robot" are the key -- nothing is at it seems, but, at the same time, everything is a symbiotic part of our inescapable human trajectory.
Death and extinction eventually become a very real specter, which Morris tellingly illustrates by showing oddly disturbing footage a circus clown being chased by a skeleton. The joke is ultimately on us, Morris seems to be saying, but it's the telling of the joke that informs the majesty of our existence.
"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" is not for the faint of brain, although even children should get a jolt out of the robots and the wild animal footage. Dense and uncompromising, this may not initially seem like your cup of tea, but that's all the more reason to see it. You'll be surprised. Rated PG. 82 minutes.
- CNN In-Depth: Showbiz
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