Philip Roth: Unmasked, the latest entry in the long-running American Masters series, arrives just after the Newark-born author’s 80th birthday. The documentary, premiering on PBS tonight, is fascinating for its relatively unmediated portrait of the normally reticent Roth. Yet, as written and directed by French documentarian William Karel and Italian journalist Livia Manera, it is a deeply puzzling and contradictory piece of filmmaking. Fans of the author (and even critics) will likely find something of value in Roth’s surprisingly direct statements on his life, work, and mortality. And yet everything surrounding those moments seems to have been placed there by filmmakers uninterested in venturing past the surface or in exploring what their subject is actually saying. Watching the film, for which Roth sat for ten hours worth of on-camera interviews at his homes in Manhattan and rural Connecticut, is a bit like being a fly on the wall...
- 3/29/2013
- by Max Winter
- Vulture
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