REVIEW: Hugh Hefner Proves Friends Shouldn't Let Friends Make Vanity Docs

Although mention is made of Playboy's literary reputation, particularly the championing of writers like Ray Bradbury and it's famous Q&A's, the naked elephant in the room is downplayed as a kind of necessary evil, as if the centerfolds were part of a grand power structure conceived to enable Hef to influence the important causes of the time, like civil rights. And while it's true that Hefner had no qualms about having black performers and guests on his shows or writers in his magazine during a racially charged era, it feels a little rich to hear him talk simply about the lack of racial taboos in his life. If civil rights were a no-brainer, some causes were more equal than others.

Mention is not made of the concurrent women's movement until an hour and twenty minutes into this too-long documentary. It is summed up briefly by pointing to televised debate in which Hefner and Brownmiller participated. It took him 35 years to formulate a rebuttal to her suggestion that he come on television with a bunny tail glued to his rear-end, and here it is: "If women weren't sexual objects there wouldn't be another generation -- that's what makes the world go around. It doesn't objectify women in that other, negative sense. But I just didn't have the language back then."

That's a fair example of about how deep this documentary -- a product of Berman's long friendship with Hefner, and it shows -- is willing to go on a number of fronts. Opportunities for deeper investigation arrive and are passed by regularly: Co-workers hint at his Gatsby-esque tendency to procure the best of everything and then not partake of it; his long-time assistant says she has quit several times because he is so unfeeling; after he complains of the jury for his obscenity trial being filled with housewives it is touched on quickly that he had a Dexedrine problem for many years -- and perhaps had more in common with those housewives than he thought; in his 80s he still falls in love like an "adolescent," idealizing interchangeably nubile young women in their prime and then moving them aside.

So who is this guy? Who was he? He seems to be better off now than he was as an uptight kid, but are we? And did that era make this one inevitable? What might have made his activities around free speech and civil rights more interesting is exploring the uneven character they sprang from. At 84 he describes himself as being kept alive by young women's laughter and infernal baby-talk, marking off perhaps his final, groaning aspirational standard. Almost makes me feel sorry for those men still trying to keep up.

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