Beyond the Multiplex

"Absolute Wilson": From the Texas prairie to the toast of Paree
If you don't know who the theater director Robert Wilson is, or if you know him only as some shadowy über-aesthete behind a series of expensive and largely incomprehensible artistic collaborations, don't feel bad. You're definitely in the majority on point 1, and 100 percent correct on point 2. Wilson is the auteur behind a distinctive brand of gestural, opaque and mostly nonverbal staging whose roots lie in puppet theater, architectural design, Futurist art, Freudian dream imagery and silent film, but not at all in the mainstream of Western drama.

I've never much cared for Wilson's work, to be honest, even when -- as in the Philip Glass opera "Einstein on the Beach" or the Tom Waits-William Burroughs collaboration "The Black Rider" -- it was obviously original and brilliant. For me, theater is always rooted in human interaction and human language (I know, how desperately old-fashioned) and whatever Wilson's theater is about, it isn't about that.

Katharina Otto-Bernstein's film "Absolute Wilson," on the other hand, is about that: It reveals Wilson as a personable and highly engaging fellow in late middle age, still carrying within him the desperately shy and unhappy boy from Waco, Texas, he used to be. His directing style emerges as not quite a conscious, aesthetic decision but something much more personal. Wilson believes he was a learning-disabled child, perhaps borderline autistic, and what's more he was a dreamy kid who always understood that he was gay, growing up in a strict Southern Baptist household with a distant mother and a disapproving father.

The stark, exaggerated, non-realistic or surrealistic character of Wilson's theater, and its highly slowed-down sense of time, emerged, then, from the artist's desperate need to express himself, free of those impediments. In Otto-Bernstein's images of Wilson's early work -- from a solo dance performance he did as a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., to the Paris sensation "Deafman Glance" (starring Wilson's deaf adopted son) to the notorious seven-day-long performance commissioned by the Shah of Iran's government -- you can feel that urgency even when the content, in any normal sense, is utterly unavailable.

It's clear that Otto-Bernstein means the film to be wholly laudatory, but she also depicts Wilson as a restless martinet who works too much and too hard, flying from Copenhagen to Tokyo to London to New York, drawing inspiration not from intellectual sources but from the constant cultural blur of airports, museums and theaters through which he flows like electrical current. He's a quintessential fusionist: All his work draws on multiple traditions and involves long lists of collaborators (indeed, in the '70s Wilson came uncomfortably close to becoming a hippie cult leader). "Absolute Wilson" changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.

I still believe that after the international sensations of "Deafman Glance" and "Einstein on the Beach," Wilson's theater declined gradually into more or less interesting Euro-kitsch, and that "The Black Rider" (the closest thing he's ever had to a pop-culture hit) established an unfortunate recipe: Find literary source and hip rock star, swizzle together and dump on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. If, like me, you sat through "POEtry," Wilson's collaboration with Lou Reed on themes drawn from Edgar Allan Poe, you may agree that we are owed an apology. But "Absolute Wilson" doesn't depend on believing in Wilson's greatness, just on his immense cultural potency and the extraordinary nature of his personal odyssey.

"Absolute Wilson" opens Oct. 27 in New York, with more cities to follow.

Fast forward: How the "Cocaine Cowboys" built a new Miami; traveling to "The Wild Blue Yonder" with Werner Herzog
Billy Corben's documentary "Cocaine Cowboys" is an exhaustive, exciting and ultimately exhausting history of how that white powder, and the Colombian crime lords who imported it by the hundreds of kilos, transformed the culture and economy of Miami, for good and for ill. Following a few supporting characters through the boom-and-bust of the coke economy -- from the mid-'70s through the late '80s -- Corben details how what looked like easy money all around, at first, eventually degenerated into vicious gang warfare that turned South Florida into the nation's murder capital.

We hear from a mid-level coke wholesaler, a pilot who flew hundreds of trips from Medellín to Miami, and a hit man for the notorious Colombian "madrina" (godmother) Griselda Blanco, queen of the coke trade, who was probably responsible for hundreds of murders. It was a lot dirtier than anything we ever saw on "Miami Vice," but for a long time it worked efficiently, allowing clubgoers all over this great land to siphon happiness up their noses at a reasonable price.

When the Reagan administration and Florida officials finally got serious about crushing the Colombian cartels in the mid-'80s, the trade, and the accompanying murder epidemic, was finally controlled. But as longtime Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan and many others observe, once all those countless millions or billions had flowed into the Miami economy -- to buy real estate, cars, jewelry and pretty much everything else -- it kept on going. The reshaping of that city as a fashionista destination in the '90s, and the construction of a sleek, new downtown skyline -- well, that money didn't grow on trees. It was harvested off bushes in the Colombian highlands. (Opens Oct. 27 in major cities.)

I suppose in some technical sense "The Wild Blue Yonder" is Werner Herzog's first new fiction film since whenever -- since "Invincible" in 2001, I suppose. But like all of Herzog's recent films (except, I guess, the relatively straightforward "Grizzly Man," which I liked) this evokes a sort of blissed-out, contemplative mood where questions of fiction vs. reality seem unimportant.

There's a plot, kind of, with Brad Dourif as one of the last of a group of aliens from a distant galaxy who settled on Earth, only to discover that they'd lost all their scientific knowledge and couldn't succeed in our society. ("I hate to tell you this," he says to the camera, "but aliens all suck.") Most of the film consists of footage Herzog has pilfered or extracted from real-life NASA space missions and Arctic underwater exploration, all to tell the tale of Earthling astronauts' long and desperate voyage to the Andromedans' home planet, made possible by various discoveries in chaos-theory mathematics that piss the Dourif alien off.

The equations that might make long-haul space travel possible are real, if entirely hypothetical, and the images in this short, witty, dream-state film are lovely. But Herzog and Dourif make no real effort at rendering a convincing science-fiction universe, and such is not the point. The "dying planet" in this parable is not a distant one, and the "disrespect" the human astronauts show for Dourif's world and its lonely, abandoned wildlife hits pretty close to home. Not a major Herzog work or one that will draw a large audience, but a must-see for those who suspect (as I do) that he's one of the greatest talents now working in this medium. (Opens Oct. 27 at the IFC Center in New York; available on DVD in mid-November.)

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