The Windmill Movie

more than a movie about trying to make a movie
At first I thought this movie was going to be too clever for its own good--a biographical movie about someone trying to make a movie about someone who spent decades trying to make his own movie, an autobiographical movie about his own life.

Alexander Olch's finished movie about an unfinished movie by Dick Rogers is all of that, but then it stops drawing attention to that clever conceit and instead becomes much more profound. In the process of showing that Dick Rogers had trouble making a movie out of his own life primarily because he had trouble making any coherent sense out of his own life, this movie says a lot about life in general. Or at least, about life, as well as death, as experienced by very privileged people. What does life mean, what is life's purpose, and what is there to strive for, when you already have what most people still wish they had?

This movie is also about acting, both in movies and in real life. Raw footage and narrated journal entries...

American Gothic within the American Pastoral
Richard "Dickie" Rogers (1944-2001) was born to a life of privilege--most of the footage presented here is of the Hamptons & Harvard-- but he always felt guilty that he did not do more to earn that privilege. So although he shot more than 200 hours of footage of the Hamptons in the years between 1944-2001 & some very choice footage of Harvard in the 70's, his feelings about these locales were always complicated. These locales certainly had much to tell him about himself, and the kind of self that he assembled had much to say about these locales, but he never assembled all of this ripe footage & commentary into a cohesive documentary that would also have been a cohesive autobiography.

In some ways Dickie's narrative, or at least the collection of narrative strands assembled here by Alexander Ochs, is not an uncommon one: privileged son feels oppressed by his own family history, feels pressured to accomplish something & do the family name proud, but feels woefully inadequate...

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
"The Windmill Movie" is a compelling documentary about Richard Rogers, a Harvard professor of film, who tried to make his own autobiographical movie. It remained in pieces... and in this movie, Rogers' former student, as well as his friends Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre (The Criterion Collection)) and Bob Balaban (A Mighty Wind) try to portray Rogers as the man in full. Rogers complains of his privileged WASP background, as if growing up in the Hamptons rendered him incapable of being a true art film director. We see very little of his documentaries-but we do see his incomplete "Windmill Movie",with Rogers explaining his upbringing.

Rogers' complicated relationships with women comes to be crucial to understanding him. His father expected him to keep his affair with his secretary a secret. In turn, Rogers was having a longtime...

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