“Lynch/Oz” (opening July 7 at Digital Gym Cinema) is a documentary exploring filmmaker David Lynch’s obsession with the 1939 MGM classic “The Wizard of Oz.”
When I saw this film listed in the Fantastic Fest schedule last year I was eager to check it out based solely on the title. I probably should have read the full description so that I did not go in with false expectations. I thought it was going to be a documentary made by David Lynch about his obsession with “The Wizard of Oz.” So I was disappointed that Lynch only makes appearances in archival clips and is never directly interviewed about Oz for this documentary.
That being said, the film did contain some glorious material about Lynch’s obsession with the world of Oz. If you love Lynch or “The Wizard of Oz,” then you need to see this documentary.
The film breaks into chapters with each narrated by someone who makes connections between Lynch and Oz.
Two of the chapters are brilliant. John Waters and Karyn Kusama deliver the best, most engaging, and insightful commentaries. Waters’ chapter is called “Kindred," exploring where the two wildly different filmmakers seem to be kindred souls on a certain level. Waters reveals his own personal obsession with Judy Garland and “The Wizard of Oz” as he explores Lynch’s.
Waters confesses, “it changed my life when I saw it. The film completely works. I think it's the perfect, like a drug to kids to get them hooked on movies for the rest of their young lives. Well, I don't think that's the only movie that influenced David Lynch or me. But certainly he probably it was maybe one of the first movies he saw too.”
Kusama recalls attending a screening of “Mulholland Drive” where Lynch did a Q&A. He was asked to explain the relationship of “The Wizard of Oz” to his film. Kusama then recalls, “His response was, ‘There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about ‘The Wizard of Oz.’' I will say that it was one of those watershed moments for me as a filmmaker to understand his sense of humility in front of another piece of art, because he said it with a kind of childlike wonder. In all of my subsequent viewings of ‘Mulholland Drive,’ I've always thought of it as a companion piece to ‘Wizard of Oz.’”
But the documentary badly missteps by having David Lowery deliver the final commentary and end with a trite montage of visual motifs that can be found throughout the careers of other filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Wong Kar-Wai, and Abbas Kiarostami. The documentaries director Alexandre O. Philippe also tries to give the film a Lynchian look and feel, which is a mistake. There is only one David Lynch. And while people often cite Oscar Wilde’s quote, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” they usually forget the second half of his observation, “that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
Philippe is not mediocre but he does expose his shortcomings in some of his choices. Better to be straightforward in approaching a topic like this.
Philippe's earlier works such as “Leap of Faith,” “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” and “The People Vs. George Lucas,” benefitted from keeping the focus very tight on a narrow topic. "Leap of Faith" was essentially just director William Friedkin talking about "The Exorcist" for 100 minutes and it was riveting. Those films were fascinating dives down rabbit holes because they looked with both a fan's obsessive eye and a scholarly sense of investigation into something iconic in pop culture. But the further this new documentary strays from Lynch and Oz, the less interesting it becomes.
But “Lynch/Oz” is worth seeing if only for the Waters and Kusama sections. Philippe is a gifted editor and assembler of film essays and this documentary will inspire you to immediately run out and rewatch all of Lynch's work and “The Wizard of Oz” with new eyes.
