On Saturday, HBO debuts “Cinema Verite,” a dramatic recreation of the early 1970s documentary “An American Family” that ran on PBS.
At the same time, WNET, the public TV station that originally produced the documentary, is replaying the entire 12-hours and is putting excerpts and one full episode online.
Amazing how far reality tv has come; amazing how little has changed. This is a fascinating subject that deserves more thought than it’s allowed in the TV movie treatment.
The 1973 documentary about the Loud family, billed as an anthropological study of an American family, was the first mesmerizing reality TV binge in which the players were told to ignore the cameras and, after a while, actually did. Viewers were hooked on the drama as the marriage fell apart, one son revealed his homosexuality and the niceties and superficial manners of the Donna Reed era disintegrated onscreen. So much about the conventions of the American family was revealed to be false, it was shocking. In high-minded discussions, Margaret Mead speculated that the TV series might mark the beginning of a new way to explore the complexities of contemporary life. She should only have lived to see “Jersey Shore.”
The HBO film, debuting Saturday at 7 p.m., takes liberties –elaborating on and guessing about the relationship between the original documentary producer Craig Gilbert and Pat Loud– and tremendously condenses the action into less than two hours. James Gandolfini is earnest as Gilbert, Diane Lane is brilliant as Pat Loud, Tim Robbins is perfectly smarmy as Bill Loud. They have the right chemistry all around. But the acting is the least interesting aspect of the film.
Our journey as a TV-watching society, from innocence of reality TV in the early 1970s to a certain understanding laced with cynicism today, is the real point. An inevitable sadness is the sense that lingers. Viewers were outraged then, at the fact that people would allow cameras to chronicle their every move in their home, at the fact that the seemingly perfect family was cracking up. Now, nobody will be outraged, except at the shortcuts the movie takes compared to the original film which, the producer (Gandolfini) notes, used “more film than World War II.” Too many questions remain about the original and the quick once-over of the movie. Looking back, it’s easy to see how the supposedly intellectual, Margaret Mead-style undertaking of the original morphed into the media freak show of today.