When is a documentary portrait, not a conventional documentary portrait? Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt when you’re relentlessly battling for narrative control with your subject throughout and are engaged in a passive-aggressive tug-of-war for dominance. That’s the extra layer of friction that adds an excellent level of tension to the already-absorbing two-part documentary “Pee-Wee As Himself” about the late Paul Reubens, aka the beloved Pee-Wee Herman.
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Directed by Matt Wolf, “Pee-Wee As Himself” is a fascinating look at a complex artist, the comedy and joy he spread, his triumphs and tribulations, but also the scars that left him with lifelong distrust—openly evinced in the open struggle between artist and filmmaker.
Director Wolf, known for “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell,” and “Teenage,” never tries to hide this ongoing conflict and opens the doc with the skirmishes right away, depicting the two of them bickering and volleying back and forth, a dynamic that persists throughout. Reubens doesn’t mind having a documentary about himself. The playful, narcissistic side of him absolutely adores the attention and self-indulgence. But Reubens clearly wishes he was directing the story himself and not Wolf—perhaps a running theme throughout his life— and there are a lot of reasons why that could make an excellent secondary psychotherapy class about identity, control, and the wounds and baggage we accumulate and how they manifest in our lives if we don’t try and address them.
200 minutes long in total and culled from 40 hours of interviews, “Pee-Wee As Himself” hopes to be Reuben’s clarification, correction and final word on himself and his enchanting alter-ego. And for better or worse, there is great finality to it: Reubens died in 2023, ironically just one day after recording one of his last interviews. More were to come, and in fact, the comedian was at odds with the filmmaker right before his death. And speaking to his deep privacy and secrecy, Reubens had been struggling with cancer for years, and no one on the documentary crew knew about it.
The importance of authorship becomes doubly clear when one realizes Reubens carefully curated his life, art and narrative— from the way he vigilantly guarded his sexuality from the press and public to the way he meticulously directed and supervised every detail of things like his Pee-Wee Herman stage shows or series like “Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse” that ran for five seasons on HBO (Reubens comes out as gay for the first time in the documentary, though for many it was already assumed).
Control, and/or lack of it, is immediately the defining thrust of “Pee-Wee As Himself.” Even something extraordinary like the magnificently enjoyable “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” was a source of painful discomfit to Reubens because Tim Burton was directing the vision and didn’t have full authority over the project even though he co-wrote it.
So, “Pee-Wee As Himself” is a somewhat familiar doc portrait—lots of historical and emotional context about his upbringing, youth, college and the fuel that drove his artistic point of view—but peppered with moments of conflict, mistrust and sometimes even playful or resentful evasion.
The history and the drama, you probably know, through his HBO show and movies, Pee-Wee Herman became a ubiquitous ’80s celebrity. But that was all disrupted during the notorious charged-for-public-indecency delinquency that nearly destroyed his career and heavily derailed it for years.
What Wolf’s doc does, however, is illuminate the human experiences these successes and mishaps beget; some hubris on the rise that leads to the splitting of friendships and creative collaborations (comedian Phil Hartman, who co-wrote ‘Big Adventure’ and was a key friend in his early days). But also the trauma, humiliation and loneliness endured from being the butt of late-night jokes for years following his porn theater shaming incident.
Reubens’s identity blur is equally interesting; where does Paul Reubens begin, and where does Pee-Wee Herman end? And what happens when two identities are so coalesced that the host body isn’t really sure whose boss anymore?
Early on, Reubens, for most of his career, only does interviews in character as Pee-Wee, and he’s often a mainstay on late-night shows like David Letterman. But as scandals rock his life in the later years—not only the indecency charge but a few years later, an oft-forgotten child pornography allegation that turns out to be false but scars the actor even further regardless—he begins to retreat more and more. And when he does grant a few interviews, one famous one to CNN where he defends himself against the brazen pedo allegations, he does them as Reubens.
This is why by the time he’s sitting in front of Wolf’s camera, Reuben often views the exercise as an interrogative torture that’s not going to do right by him, twist his narrative and perhaps focus too much on the arrest or the false, trumped-up child-porn accusations.
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If only Reubens were alive to see the film, he’d understand that Wolf has major empathy for him and paints a very fair and balanced portrait of the comedian and actor. Wolf clearly admires the artist, his persona and the joyous, silly and charmingly goofy art he created.
So, while all the most significant hit moments are there, the rise to stardom, a deep dive into “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” and “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure“—less about the disappointing “Big Top Pee-Wee” other than a natural segue to hard times which that failed film announces—the doc’s most vulnerable, intimate moments are really all about the times, Reuben lets his guard down. But tellingly, Reubens also quickly puts up walls when he feels like he’s oversharing or revealing too much of the secret sauce.
Wolf clearly gets more than he bargained for in the doc but makes the most of working in conflict for the documentary. Ultimately, Herman was seemingly betrayed by the world—at least in his estimation—universally adored at first and then unanimously scorned for kink related to his already-hidden sexuality. This pain is understandably too hard to bear for Reubens and the reason he’s often suspicious of Wolf’s motifs. To this end, it’s probably not the doc HBO and Wolf likely originally envisioned. But documentary filmmaking is a discovery process, so good on Wolf for embracing Reubens’ wariness and integrating the doubt into the fabric of Pee-Wee’s complicated and engaging personal story. [B+]
