MIKE WALLACE IS HERE

Directed by Avi Belkin.

As someone who has spent the greater part of his professional career interviewing people, I watched MIKE WALLACE IS HERE wishing I could interview the director. And I would do it with questions delivered with some of the hard-charging style that was Wallace’s trademark.

For example—

Why spend the first half of the documentary on some kind of hyper-drive? The movie breaks out of the gate with shock cuts and breathless pacing, allowing no time for viewer reflection and processing.

Second, why cut short so many of Wallace’s interviews, allowing us no sense of the give-and-take of his repartee?

Third, why are most of the famous faces in front of Wallace’s microphone not identified? Younger viewers who don’t stay for the final credits will be baffled.

Fourth, why repeat to the point of tedium the use of split screens and transition devices like television static and color bars? Enough is enough. We get it. It’s about television.

Meanwhile, we race through the requisite Greatest Hits of his career as a pitchman (lots of cigarette commercials), as host of the ground-breaking radio program, Night Beat, his work for CBS (especially 60 Minutes), the controversies surrounding his controversies with the cigarette industry, Watergate, and Vietnam. As Wallace enters his 70s and 80s, his energy scarcely flags, as his drive for professionalism gives way to a desperate need to stave off mortality. The documentary is at its best here, although, as I’ve noted, it’s hectic pace tends to derail its impact.

Aside from a few skirmishes with his private life—his regrets about fatherhood, grief at the death of his son, Peter, the grinding depression that led to a surprising revelation about a suicide attempt—the film emerges as just one more procession of Big Names, from Malcolm X to Bette Davis, from Barbra Streisand to General Westmoreland, from Ayatollah Khomeini to Thomas Hart Benton. It’s mix-master blend of the pop and the profound effectively defines the decades of his best work.

In sum, we learn little about Wallace’s technique, how he worked, how he prepared for interviews. There is one tiny, startling moment, when it’s revealed that during some occasions his questions were prepared in advance for him by somebody else. Really? Tell me more.

There are only a few moments at the end where we feel the pangs of loss of someone like Wallace, who died in his 90s in 2012. Should not a documentary about an investigative reporter wear its own heart on its sleeve? Warts and all, we need someone like him now, more than ever. Beyond his quirks and ego, his was a fearless spirit that should not be allowed to be squashed by the deafening noise of the Trump Era. Indeed, the Donald is seen briefly in an interview from the early 90s, and we can only regret that he did not make good on his promise not to enter politics.

Finally, younger viewers may be startled at all the smoking going on throughout the film. Everybody smokes. All the time. Cigarettes dangle from stained fingers. The entire film is seen through the haze of cigarettes. Hey, it was the 1950s and 1960s. As Walter Cronkite said, “That’s the way it was.”