'Mike Wallace' documentary a timely, telling portrait of TV journalist
"Mike Wallace is Here" - ½
Avi Belkin's tight and hard-hitting journalistic profile "Mike Wallace is Here" begins with a classic square-off between the irascible CBS interviewer and Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly.
Wallace, brandishing his trademark perpetually peeved expression, plays a clip of O'Reilly screaming "Shut up!" at his interviewees.
"You say you're a journalist?" Wallace says.
"Correct," O'Reilly replies.
"I would say you're an op-ed columnist," Wallace says, "and that's different."
"No, it's not," O'Reilly retorts. "You're a dinosaur."
Wallace's eyes shoot a death ray directly at O'Reilly.
Mike Wallace.
For most of seven decades, that name alone with its concrete consonants struck fear and trepidation in the hearts of the rich, the powerful, the popular and the infamous.
Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barbra Streisand, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bette Davis, Oprah Winfrey and Shirley MacLaine lead the impressive list of people mercilessly grilled by Wallace.
Yet, politicians and celebrities rarely said no to being interviewed by the man who surely would have been nicknamed "Mike Hammer" had it not already been assigned to Mickey Spillane's detective.
Belkin's documentary (the first English-language feature from the Tel Aviv native) doesn't explore why people felt compelled to test themselves by courting Wallace's laserlike powers of analysis.
But it provides a punchy, unvarnished look at a complex, ambitious young man who struggled to find his niche in the emerging world of network television.
He did everything: modeling, TV commercials for cigarettes and shortening, acting in dramas, man-on-the street interviews. Whatever.
In 1956, his first interview show, the black-and-white, film-noiry "Night Beat," foreshadowed the confrontational journalist he would become.
Wisely, Belkin crafts a compelling, comprehensive look at its subject without the usual voice-over narrations common to most documentaries.
He makes efficient, effective use of the ample archival material featuring Wallace both before and behind the camera, revealing a real man quite different from the one projected on a TV screen.
Wallace admits to being a poor father and husband (married four times), and suffered bouts of such terrible depression that he once attempted suicide with pills.
In 1962, Wallace's older son Peter (Chris Wallace is the younger one) disappeared while mountain-climbing in Greece.
Wallace flew to Greece and in one of those "you can't make this stuff up" moments, discovers his son's body at the bottom of a gorge.
You soon realize that Wallace's perpetually peeved expression may be less directed at people he interviews than at life itself.
In a perfect world, "Mike Wallace is Here" would have been created and released closer to the journalist's 2012 death, as a fitting postscript to a trailblazing career.
But Belkin's doc retains its timeliness by reminding American journalists they must speak truth to power.
Plus, they must deploy that underutilized weapon in their journalistic arsenal, the follow-up question, with ruthless prosecution.
Mike would like that.
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Directed by: Avi Belkin
Other: A Magnolia Pictures release. Not rated. Contains adult language. 91 minutes