Dear reader, you'll be pleased (I hope!) to know that I turned down hot Mexican sex in favor of political intrigue, betrayal and heartbreak. OK, there's a little bit of sex mixed in there too. And I'm glad I did. But first, a few words about another documentary here at the festival, Errol Morris's Tabloid, which tells the wild and weird tale of Joyce McKinney, a onetime beauty queen who, in 1977, trekked from Utah to London to kidnap her Mormon boyfriend, who'd been sent there as a missionary. The account of what actually happened varies depending on who's telling the story, but by piecing together interviews with UK newspaper gossip columnists and photo editors, Mormon experts and McKinney herself -- a pleasant-looking, moon-faced woman who's clearly bonkers -- Morris lays out the basics: McKinney, hoping to rescue her beloved from the clutches of his nutso, controlling religion, enlisted a friend to help her snatch him away from the Mormon temple where he was stationed, possibly knocking him out with chloroform. She then whisked him off to a cottage in Devon, chained him to the bed and made mad, passionate love to him. It's not clear whether the beloved -- a guy named Kirk Anderson -- went along with this scheme or was forced against his will, but McKinney was nonetheless arrested and charged with kidnapping. She subsequently jumped bail and fled to the United States, and more scandal -- involving prostitution and kinky sex -- followed.
The UK press had a field day with the "Mormon sex in chains" case, and Morris casts a mischievous eye over the whole affair. Tabloid is minor Morris, but the picture is fascinating and hugely entertaining. McKinney is a strange one, all right. She beams beatifically when she recalls her lost love, and waxes poetic about the idea of whether it's actually possible for a woman to rape a man: "I think that's like putting a marshmallow in a parking meter!" she says in her soft southern accent, adding a girlish giggle. Morris also wrangles with the secret superpowers of Mormon underpants and the miracle of cloned puppies, two things you probably never thought you'd see addressed in one documentary.
Far more serious-minded and admittedly quite a bit less entertaining is Thom Zimny's earnest The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which chronicles the difficulties Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band faced after the massive surprise success of Born to Run. Zimny combines present-day interviews with vintage recording-studio footage, in velvety black-and-white, of Springsteen and his gang horsing around, stressing out and, eventually, recording. In the present-day interviews Springsteen is, as usual, calmly philosophical and possessed of a great deal of old-fashioned common sense as he talks about his songwriting process (after the album was finally completed, dozens of songs lay unfinished and rejected) and about how important that album was for him, as a way of paying tribute to where he came from and how hard his parents worked just to make ends meet.
Though I don't expect everyone to love Bruce Springsteen, I generally distrust anyone who actively dislikes him. And face it: It's hard to discount how great-looking he always has been, and is. If you grew up in a blue-collar or lower-middle-class family, Springsteen represented a possible ideal boyfriend, the kind of guy you could attain even if your father didn't have a fancy job; he was an approachable poet. The footage Zimny gathers shows Springsteen in all his youthful, no-big-deal glory: It's touching to see, even though most of that footage shows him and his bandmates at loose ends, just not knowing what to do.
The picture's finest section, for me, is the one that deals with "Because the Night," which Springsteen couldn't (or didn't want to) finish and which he gladly handed over to Patti Smith. Springsteen candidly says that he just didn't feel ready to write a love song at that point -- he didn't want to do the hard work of it.
On-camera Smith, looking radiant in own ragamuffin way, tells a wonderful story about how she came to finish the song. She was involved in a long-distance romance with the man who would later become her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, and one evening, she was waiting for him to call. Frustrated, she sat down to flesh out Springsteen's unfinished lyrics. "In the end," Smith explains with a smile that's both impossibly shy and incredibly open, "it tells the story of me waiting for Fred to call, and of my love for Fred." Fred did call, at about 3 a.m., but Smith says she wasn't angry. She had finished her portion of a glorious and passionate song about one of the most agonizing aspects of modern love: Waiting for a boy to call.
Whenever I sit down to watch an Alex Gibney documentary, I feel a twinge of anxiety -- not because Gibney's work isn't usually great (it is), but because I know he's going to present me with massive doses of information that, even though arranged in neatly organized packets, will take a great deal of concentration to process. And that's certainly true of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which offers exactly what it promises: A detailed examination of the ambitious ascent and ultimate toppling of the 54th governor of New York State.
But what's surprising, and great, about the film is how sympathetic it is: While there's certainly hypocrisy in the fact that before his own decline Spitzer helped the FBI and the NYPD bring down a prostitution ring, the "crime" that ultimately sank his career -- paying for sex -- is minor in comparison to the foibles of plenty of other politicians. And although Gibney very slyly declines to spell it out, there's barely a doubt that the Wall Street hotshots whose recklessness Spitzer exposed had at least something to do with exposing his illicit, ill-advised actions.
The first half of Client 9 is a portrait of an aggressive, prickly guy who, no matter what mistakes he'd go on to make in his personal life, also comes off as blazingly intelligent and staunchly principled. Gibney, in his characteristically methodical fashion, maps the breadth of Spitzer's achievements and embarrassments as if he were building a vast, detailed landscape for a model train. Long before the economy crashed, Spitzer trained his alert, pitbull eyes on corruption at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and AIG, and he went for the jugular. But he wasn't necessarily easy to work with or for, and he was dogged by controversy even before he was caught with his hand in the proverbial honeypot, most significantly the "Troopergate" scandal.
But Gibney really gets cooking in the second half of Client 9, which features some fascinating material gleaned from one of the call girls Spitzer spent time with, a woman code-named "Angelina." In the early days of the scandal, an escort named Ashley Dupre emerged as Spitzer's alleged favorite, and she lost no time in spinning her notoriety into gold. But Gibney reveals that Spitzer saw Dupre only once. Angelina was the woman he saw more frequently, and though she agreed to speak with Gibney, she refused to appear before the camera. Gibney hired an actress to play Angelina, using the transcript of Gibney's interviews with her as the script.
Angelina comes off as an intelligent, discreet woman who realized she had no choice but to cooperate with the FBI, although she refused to provide them with information she deemed irrelevant. When FBI agents asked her if Spitzer liked any particular sex toys, she says she told them that that couldn't possibly have anything to do with their investigation. And on-camera she tells us that no, he didn't. While she doesn't overtly protect or exonerate Spitzer, her words make it clear that she thinks what happened to him, and not what he did, is the real disgrace.
The conclusion that Gibney gradually but succinctly works toward is that Spitzer certainly did make mistakes. But Gibney also stresses that Spitzer's chief transgression -- basically, the guy had sex -- is a crime against his wife and family, not against the state. I found Spitzer's on-camera interview footage extremely touching: He's wholly comfortable, a little jovial, even, when he's talking about the ungodly behavior he saw in the financial sector, and about how he felt it was his duty to blow the lid off it. But when he talks about sex, he's awkward and businesslike, particularly when he explains (and I'm paraphrasing, using many more words than he did) that he chose to avail himself of an escort service rather than become involved in an affair that might lead to a deeper emotional entanglement. The latter, he had concluded in his lawyer-like way, would be far more damaging to his family.
Some may not see that as common sense or wise judgment. But when it comes to sex, who among us can claim a spotless record of wise judgment? Client 9 is edifying, fascinating, and in the end, more than a little heartbreaking. As a public figure, Eliot Spitzer is a stiff, brainy, unsexy guy. And like the rest of us mere mortals, he probably wishes to be a very different self in his most private moments.