Nobody would accuse Gay Talese of being modest. The trim, dapper icon of New York journalism who runs hot and cold and ever opinionated in Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s unexpectedly comedic documentary “Voyeur” sees himself as a bold hunter ever seeking out The Big Story. He’s got reason to. The broadside books and in depth articles he’s produced over the decades, from his pioneering New Journalism story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” to his deep-dive books on everything from the “New York Times” to the Mafia, try to tell the story of America in ways that fiction would struggle with. After all, that was the appeal of New Journalism: Reported facts combined with the literary license of lived fiction. “Fuck the Great American Novel,” Talese announces during a particularly defensive scene. That comes later in the movie, once his well-tailored facade has started to crumble in the face of evidence that his latest great story might not have been entirely factual.
“Voyeur,” which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival and will run on Netflix later this year, tracks the complex relationship between two seemingly very different men whose pasts are similarly wrapped up in public sex. Talese’s connection to the subject came up after the release in 1981 of his book “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” The result of eights years of research into American sexual mores, publicity around the book’s release focused (not surprisingly) on Talese’s acknowledgment that for his research he got right there with the swinging group sex scene of the 1970s. You can’t really report that kind of thing standing in the press box, the still-married Talese says with brassy hubris during a “Donahue” clip that shows up in the movie.
The other player in “Voyeur” has a different take. Gerald Foos wrote to Talese not long after “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” came out, saying, Boy do I have a story for you! According to Foos, he bought the Manor House motel in Colorado in 1970 for one specific reason: to watch people without them knowing it, preferably while they were having sex. Foos built a viewing platform in the attic so that he could spend long nights up there peering down through the vents into all the rooms. He tells Talese that he took voluminous notes of everything that he saw, dated and heavily detailed. A man with more than a few pretensions, Foos imagined himself as not just some peeping tom but a pioneer, a kind of self-taught Alfred Kinsey compiling an exhaustive chronicle of everyday American sexual mores. Foos’s notes refer to himself in the third-person as “The Voyeur” and he bridles at the notion that he’s just some creep. In one of her many deadpan lines that bring many of the movie’s surprising number of laughs, Foos’s wife Anita reminds him during a rare break in his ever-more paranoid and self-aggrandizing monologues, “Well, you are.”
For a writer like Talese, who says “I’m a voyeur myself,” this kind of first-hand material is a gold mine. (As far as can be determined from the movie, Talese spares as little thought to the moral implications of what Foos did all those years as Foos has himself.) But Foos, a bearish and monomaniacal lunger who spends much of the movie vacillating between desiring the great fame he believes he is due and a pathological fear of any kind of publicity, kept Talese waiting for decades. The filmmakers pick up the story at the point when Talese has convinced Foos, who has sold the motel and retired, that the statute of limitations would have run out on his invasions of guests’ privacy. More to the point, Talese convinces Foos that he probably won’t get in trouble for that little matter of the murder he witnessed.
In what looks like a well-orchestrated publishing blitz, we see Talese, with the filmmakers in tow, managing the release of his story first as a showstopping feature in the April 11, 2016 issue of the New Yorker and then as a full-length book which was published in July 2016. In scene after scene, Talese talks with Foos less as a source than co-conspirator in his great return to journalistic glory. All is going according to plan. Then, it all starts to unravel once it appears that Foos was not entirely accurate about everything he told Talese, who appears to have spent less time double-checking his single source than he should have.
On its surface, “Voyeur” is about sex. Yet it’s hard to imagine that a less-sexy movie will be seen this year. That is not a criticism. A movie more focused on titillation or shock value would have had truckloads of material to work with here. But the filmmakers would rather have their aged subjects talk about motivation and morality, which is ultimately far more interesting than any purportedly mind-blowing dip into the life of a man who wanted only to watch people and the fame-seeking writer who got burned in the end.
The interplay between Foos and Talese makes for a sometimes exasperating, and frequently comedic, story. They each share a large vision of themselves, even though Foos ultimately defers to Talese. (Surprisingly, Foos even agreed to an idiosyncratic request from the always dapper Talese, the son of a tailor, that he and Anita had to always be dressed to the nines when they met.)
But both men also rail against a larger world that refuses to comport itself in the way that they prefer. Talese grouses about what the New Yorker’s famously punctilious fact-checker might want to change in his article and smashes through the fourth wall during one interview where he vehemently complains about how the filmmakers are framing a question. Foos complains about Talese not showing him the manuscript before publishing, believing that people reading about his supposedly priceless baseball card collection is somehow putting his life in danger. In one unexpectedly hilarious scene, Foos descends on a staircase wheelchair lift while railing ad nauseum about Talese; the mix of his snail-like pace and ever more vituperative fury is as funny and ultimately disturbing as any sociopathic set piece the Coen brothers ever imagined.
Unfortunately, the tendency of “Voyeur” to tilt towards comedy undermines the weight of its story. There is a lot of material to unpack here, from conflicting notions of private and public in modern America to how fame-seeking and truth-telling can work at cross purposes and the moral question of voyeurism itself. As much as Talese talks about being a participant in the stories he writes, he never, in the course of the movie a least, deals directly with why Foos did what he did. It’s possible that there ultimately was no reason, that this was simply a hardwired fetish that became mixed up with his grandiose sense of self. But if that was the case, then the story becomes not about the Why but only the How. Facts without intent can never tell the Great American Story that Talese wants to write. [B]
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