Movie Review: John Anderson on 'The Windmill Movie'

The late documentarian and teacher Richard P. Rogers tried for 25 years to make a movie about his life, and "The Windmill Movie" is not that movie. It's a movie about his not being able to make a movie.

It's also a much better film than the one Rogers would have made. It likely would have made him laugh to find out that within his wheel-spinning and navel-gazing was a story far more profound than the one he was trying to tell. And that he had to die to tell it.

Director Alexander Olch's re-creation/re-imagining of Rogers's thwarted autobiographical pic performs an act of cinematic archeology that could only have been a labor of love. The result is a profoundly empathetic study of unfulfilled artistic ambition, and of the emotional ruthlessness that often separates great artists from decent people.

Rogers, an influential Harvard film lecturer who died of brain cancer in 2001, was a child of money whose summers at Wainscott (the Long Island, N.Y., town with the windmill en route to the Hamptons) predominate the dreamlike snatches of imagery that Olch works, collagelike, throughout his film. Rogers could never separate himself sufficiently from his history, or himself, to tell his story in a manner cutthroat enough that others might care. "To be this privileged, this white, this rich and be bitching about it," he says, was an affront to good taste. The viewer loves Rogers for realizing this.

But self-effacement and insight don't necessarily add up to cinema, and amid his misfires, Rogers regularly asks himself whether his story might better be told by others. This turns out to be true, although not the way Rogers imagined.

It is in the mechanics of his frustration -- which Olch alchemizes into an aesthetic -- that Rogers's life and work become exalted. His white, privileged background might not connect with everyone, but his thwarted desire does. So does "The Windmill Movie's" fanciful suspension of time and memory: In one scene, Rogers sits at an editing bay, watching footage of his late mother respond to his plea about not being loved or supported.

"Why didn't you stick to painting?" she bellows, clarifying why Rogers wanted to make his movie, perhaps why he couldn't, and why we're lucky that film is a collaborative medium, even post-life.

The Windmill Movie (82 minutes, opening today at AFI Silver) is not rated. It contains adult content and language.