Sam Levy, with a lovely, skittering free-jazz score by Kris Bowers, these sequences seem more than coincidentally reminiscent of Alejandro G. Inarritu’s anatomy-of-an-actor “Birdman.” It’s not the most obvious choice of reference for a Lear study, though there are several ways to tease out the subtext: After a life spent creating characters, has Lear perhaps become one - or more than one - in his own memory? Iridescently shot by Noah Baumbach’s current d.p. In the helmers’ most stylized move, Lear’s life is presented as a theater dressed with overlapping television screens his 9-year-old self (played by Keaton Nigel Cooke) wanders this live collage of past, future and present, while the real-life Lear - still tack-sharp at 93 - looks on.
NORMAN LEAR AMERICAN MASTERS PROFESSIONAL
Marlow and Enat Sidi’s playful editing nimbly divides Lear’s storied life into sliding personal and professional planes. (Or vice versa, as some of the film’s more ardent celebrity interviewees - George Clooney and Rob Reiner among them - might prefer to argue.) Given this pedigree, then, accomplished documakers Ewing and Grady (“Jesus Camp”) are to be commended for making a film that itself resists standard televisual presentation: There’s a warm, spotlit sheen even to its talking-heads footage, while J.D. Kicking off Sundance’s Documentary Premieres program on a lively note, this PBS American Masters production will surely find its most receptive audience on, appropriately enough, the medium that made Lear great. Brassily entertaining as it is, “Just Another Version of You” could use a little more such bristle. Generally laudatory in its approach to its irresistible human subject - if Lear’s signature white hat remains immovably on his head, the film’s stays very much in hand - this appreciation is nonetheless most fascinating in a brief stretch where the political correctness of Lear’s work is called into question by black performers. Instead, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s sprightly, brightly assembled celebration of the veteran showrunner holds up a mirror to contemporary American television, tacitly asking if it’s addressing issues of difference and prejudice as directly (and daringly) as Lear’s shows, including such 1970s staples as “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons,” did. entertainment industry currently under intense scrutiny, “ Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” doesn’t feel quite like the comforting nostalgia trip one might expect. With politics of representation in the U.S.
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