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June 12, 2008
A 1980s golden boy gone to seed
With many documentary profiles these days it’s impossible to tell if the filmmakers are mocking or celebrating their subjects.
Last week, a Bridgeport audience packed a benefit preview of a new film, “The Accidental Mayor,” about the short and rather sad reign of John M. Fabrizi who took over the city government after his predecessor was sent to the slammer.
Although it sometimes looks like Fabrizi is being exploited by the moviemaker for buffoonish jokes, the ex-mayor agreed to let the cameras follow him and set himself up for derision, so you can’t really criticize director Larry Locke for letting the camera run and picking up every self-dramatizing excess of the politician.
Another fascinating — and troubling — behind-the scenes documentary, “The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale,” is being previewed at the Bantam Cinema Saturday at noon before it receives national exposure on HBO July 7.
Director Jeff Stimmel takes the viewer into the life of painter Chuck Connelly who was a peer of Julian Schnabel and the other hot New York artists of the 1980s, but who ceased being trendy and collectible in the early 1990s.
Stimmel shows us footage of Connelly when he was young and handsome — and selling several hundred thousand dollars worth of his work — but then cuts to the painter as he is today, alcoholic and often deranged and living in obscurity in Philadelphia.
The film implies that Connelly’s career took a catastrophic hit after he agreed to act as an adviser to Martin Scorsese on his art-world segment of “New York Stories” (1989) and then had the gall to criticize the movie. Stimmel doesn’t include an interview with Scorsese or anyone else involved with the film, so we are left wondering exactly how a Page Six item in The New York Post could have had such far-reaching consequences on a trendy painter.
Whether through discretion — or lack of access to willing interview subjects — Stimmel never digs into the specifics of Connelly’s descent into continual drunkenness and who-knows-what associated mental illness.
In the present-day scenes in Philadelphia and New York City, the artist embarrasses himself and the friends and family who make the mistake of crossing his path with cameras rolling. Connelly’s French wife is seen in several introductory scenes — where she is treated abominably by her spouse — and then disappears for off-screen divorce negotiations.
There is a strong element of exploitation in the movie’s exposure of a drunken man babbling nonsense in scene after scene. Yes, Connelly is a public figure who invited cameras into his life, but was he in any condition to realize what he was doing?
Still, "The Art of Failure" makes for a compelling hour and those who attend the screening in Bantam will have a chance to question Stimmel and to meet Connelly who says he is attending the Saturday event.
The New Arts Gallery in Litchfield is holding a show of Connelly’s work in conjunction with the unveiling of the HBO film, so perhaps this dark and disturbing movie will help the artist in the long run.
For information on Saturday's screening, call 860-567-5015.
Posted by Joe on June 12, 2008 6:07 PM
