The Amaz­ing Johnathan Documentary

“Can you trust any­thing that a magi­cian does?” This is the cru­cial query posed to direc­tor Ben Berman mid­way through his film about one. It sets off a series of sec­ond-guess­es that threat­en to col­lapse his project.

Doubt­ing his own integri­ty as well as the hon­esty of his prin­ci­pal sub­ject, he starts to ques­tion not just the direc­tion that his own film is tak­ing, but the valid­i­ty of his entire pro­fes­sion­al field. What does it mean to adopt a way of work­ing where the best out­come is often a bad one, and the fastest route to reach­ing results is rarely the most righteous?

Berman’s focus is John Sze­les, an Amer­i­can magi­cian who made a lot of mon­ey off a gross-out act in the ​’80s. Now drug-depen­dent, out of work and ter­mi­nal­ly ill, he stages a come­back tour to cash in on the fact that – hav­ing out­last­ed his ini­tial prog­no­sis – he might die on stage at any moment. It’s a grim­ly com­ic sit­u­a­tion and, unsur­pris­ing­ly, Berman isn’t the only one inter­est­ed in doc­u­ment­ing it.

Giv­en that The Amaz­ing Johnathan Doc­u­men­tary is a film shaped around a series of com­pelling­ly staged and struc­tured sur­pris­es, to say any more about the route it takes would under­mine its desired effect. As with sim­i­lar­ly slip­pery, twisty-turny pop-doc meta-exer­cis­es as Tick­led and Three Iden­ti­cal Strangers, lit­tle about this sto­ry is as it first seems.

What sep­a­rates it from those films are its sub­ver­sions of the con­ven­tions of the sort of stan­dard doc-biopic it ini­tial­ly posi­tions itself as. It expos­es the volatil­i­ty and unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing by mak­ing it a plot point. By under­scor­ing his manip­u­la­tions, indul­gences and eth­i­cal over­sights as a film­mak­er, Berman man­ages to cre­ate some­thing smarter and fun­nier than the film he set out to make. His sub­ject might disagree.