Northampton native Jeff Zimbalist’s documentary uncovers the many layers of a literary provocateur in ‘How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer,’ showing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Directed and co-written by award-winning filmmaker Jeff Zimbalist, a Northampton, Mass. native (“Favela Rising”), “How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer” is a well-informed documentary with an unusual title that explores the life of one of the most celebrated and controversial writers of the 20th century.
Exploding on the scene when he was a 25-year-old World War II veteran and author of “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), Mailer was a Jew born in New Jersey, raised in Brooklyn, where he later lived, and educated at Harvard, matriculating at age 16. His first novel was famous for its use of the euphemism “fug” in place of a censored profanity and its unusually graphic and provocative depictions of war. The book was an acclaimed best-seller and has never been out of print. For decades, Mailer worked as a novelist and journalist, often at Esquire and Harper’s Magazine. Eventually, Mailer would be credited with pioneering the genre known as “new journalism,” mixing fiction and non-fiction. Notably, there is no mention of Truman Capote in the film, author of “In Cold Blood” (1966) and a historically significant Mailer colleague and adversary, who once claimed that Mailer had “no talent. None, none, none.”
Zimbalist reminds us that Mailer was also famous as a hard-drinking, tough-talking boxing enthusiast and brawler, who in 1960 stabbed his first wife, Adele, almost killing her (Mailer would be married six times). He was placed in the psych ward at Bellevue. His wife later refused to press charges. During this period, we are also reminded that Mailer indulged in booze, stimulants, sedatives, weed, and tobacco. At the same time, he co-founded The Village Voice, published the revolutionary collection “Advertisements for Myself” and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City.
Zimbalist’s style is to cut, cut, cut. Co-written with producer Victoria Marquette (“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain”), “Norman Mailer” is biography in snippets. Combining archival footage, some of it new and startling, with interviews with such Mailer colleagues and confidants as Gay Talese (“Honor Thy Father”), New Yorker critic David Denby, writer Dotson Rader, and actor Stephen Mailer, one of Mailer’s nine children, “Norman Mailer” is a portrait of the artist as combative ego-maniac. Mailer, who was not physically imposing, trained like a boxer and wrote a book about the fight in Africa between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Mailer picked fights. In one strange bout, he took on New York City’s most noteworthy feminists on stage by himself (Kate Millet coined the expression “male chauvinist pig” to describe Mailer), surprisingly ending in a mutually respectful draw.
Is it any surprise that Oliver Stone is a big Mailer fan? “The Armies of the Night? History as a Novel/The Novel as History” (1968), an account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon, was another landmark. Based on a lengthy essay in “Harper’s Magazine,” the novel, which blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction, earned Mailer a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Sadly, Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” perhaps a greater, more lasting achievement, received neither accolade.
A self-taught filmmaker, Mailer made improvisational efforts such as “Maidstone,” a 1970 drama co-starring Warhol “superstar” Ultraviolet about a film director who runs for U.S. President (also Mailer) and is best known for a scene in which actor Rip Torn attacks Mailer with a hammer, striking him on the skull. Fans of Mailer’s 1987 Provincetown, Cape Cod-set, semi-hard-boiled “faux noir” “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (39% on the Tomatometer) will be disappointed. The film is also nowhere to be found. Following the success and acclaim of the “In Cold Blood”-like “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), Mailer lobbied for the release of career criminal author Jack Henry Abbott (“In the Belly of the Beast”), who went on to murder an unarmed man in New York City. The event cast another calamitous shadow over Mailer’s life. Throughout the film, we see glimpses of Mailer’s waterfront home in Provincetown, where he is buried and presumably found respite from the fray. Seeing the 1971 “Dick Cavett Show” tape again, in which a belligerent Mailer mistakenly tries to match wits with Cavett and spectacularly fails, is a shocking reminder of how tame talk shows have become. Bring Mailer back.
‘How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer’
A post-screening Q&A with Mailer’s daughter, Maggie Mailer, will take place at 7 p.m. on August 19 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre
Rating: Not rated, profanity, nudity, violence, alcohol abuse.
Cast: Norman Mailer, Adele Mailer, David Denby, Dick Cavett, Maggie Mailer.
Director: Jeff Zimbalist
Writer: Zimbalist, Victoria Marquette
Running time: 102 minutes
Where to Watch: Opening August 16 at Coolidge Corner Theatre
Grade: B+
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