Wormwood (2017)

For the most part I have been out of step with many fans of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed this Netflix miniseries in typical fashion for him. His breakthrough picture for most—The Thin Blue Line (1988)—also happens to be where he lost me, though his previous films (Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida) certainly had their own problems. With The Thin Blue Line, Morris adopted a more sincere, crusading journalist approach even as he indulged various arty cinematic impulses, which have dogged his work (and apparently impressed the critics) ever since. Wormwood is a great example of both. On the journalist side, he takes on the case of Frank Olson, a CIA scientist specializing in biological warfare who died under mysterious, unexplained circumstances in 1953. Morris works with Olson's son Eric, who was a young boy at the time of his father's death and has spent much of his life trying to get to the bottom of it. In many ways Morris even shows up the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who once called the Olsons the most "uncurious" family he'd ever heard of for accepting the CIA's first account of the death, which is that Olson "fell or jumped" from a 10th-floor hotel room in some kind of terrible accident, smashing the window on his way out. Hersh made his observation of the Olsons in 1975, when a second version of the story came out. Now we were told that Olson had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment, subsequently suffered a mental breakdown, and now his death was called a suicide. This is the story that a curiously uncurious Hersh believed until circa 2014, when Eric Olson personally challenged him with his own theory that the CIA murdered his father. This had somehow never occurred to Hersh, who checked with a source and within 48 hours could confirm the murder, though he could not give any more detail than that for fear of burning his source. In many ways, Morris the journalist is thus able to paint himself as superior even to Hersh, who does not come across well in this documentary.

On the cinema side, meanwhile, Wormwood is Morris at his best or worst, depending on your view. It's full of art and cinema: slo-mo reenactments with Hollywood stars, brooding layers of text and images, fancy transitions, clips from practically every movie anyone mentions, some pretty good pop music, a whole treatment of Hamlet (from which the title among other things), etc., etc. It took me until the last episode to notice the clock in the room where the lengthy interview with Eric Olson took place is stopped at 2:35—the time his father died in 1953. That's all clever and good, but at four hours this six-part epic miniseries is just way too long, and a lot of it is padding. As a reviewer says on IMDb, there's an excellent 90-minute documentary here lost in the caverns of overproduction. Eric gets to make a pretty good case that his father was killed by the CIA, but Morris's intention seems to be more along the lines of wondering what we can ever really know for sure. Certainly this is one of those cases where it seems likely we will never know the whole story. At least, perhaps, Eric got the chance to argue convincingly for murder, in what has turned out to consume his whole life. He may have got some closure or satisfaction with this version of the story (certainly in regard to Hersh), but sadly, Wormwood is mostly more of a wasted opportunity.