Sundance 2009: "Reporter" Review - Written by Mathius Mack Gertz

Reporter
USA, 2008, 92min., color
Genre: Documentary
Director/Cinematographer/Editor: Eric Daniel Metzger
Executive Producer: Ben Affleck
Producers: Mikaela Beardsley, Steven Cantor
Original Music: Eric Liebman
Sound Recordist: Gautam Choudhury
EIC: Terry Clark
Narrator: Eric Daniel Metzger


Reporter is about Nicholas Kristof, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, whose provoking editorial columns have helped move the international media spotlight on humanitarian crisis around the world. The film offers insights into how the celebrated writer connects with readers by searching for individuals, whose intimate stories capture their country’s desperate crisis, thereby mobilizing readers worldwide. His writings on the genocide in Darfur helped propel the humanitarian crisis into the national conversation and here, he hopes to do the same for The Congo—a certifiable disaster area where 5.4 million have died in the last decade as a result of unceasing warfare over territory, resources and tribal hatred. Keenly aware that broad statistics numb his readers’ interest and compassion, Kristoff and two young travelers search for that one transcendent story that will connect with the hearts and minds of people in the world outside. Along the way, the reporter and his crew trek through ravaged villages and displacement camps and make a harrowing visit to Congo’s reigning rebel warlord, General Nkunda, at his jungle hideout.

Eric Daniel Metzgar’s examination of Nicholas Kristof is honest and revealing. Not content to delve deeper into his subject, Metzgar attempts to create a ceaseless, multilayered exploration of journalism, Congo, war, suffering and a world in chaos. Along the way he seems to indulge in the very mistakes that Kristof counsels against, overloading your audience. No less a figure than Alfred Hitchcock has said that if you want to build tension and suspense you have to break it up with comedy in order to prevent your audience from becoming numb. Mr. Metzger must have been absent that day.

Using the short-form field camera style made current again in the opening of Saving Private Ryan (1998) combined with numerous gratuitous fast motion sequences, we are bombarded with images. So much so that we have to expend energy defending against his over indulgent self reflexive style. I have written previously about how film is a derivative art form and collaborative by nature. Here, as in his previous two feature documentaries, Metzger wears four hats. I have not seen his first two, but in Reporter it does not work. At the very least he would have benefited from a separate editor to bring another eye to the material and clean it up a bit. With Ben Affleck as EP, I cannot imagine money was the issue. Still worth while seeing for the material. Three stars.