Mark Reviews Movies: THE BOOKSELLERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 16, 2020

Director D.W. Young's scattershot approach to The Booksellers does the movie's topic and its subjects no favors. The central topic of this documentary is the book, primarily that of the antiquarian variety, and its main subjects are booksellers, all of them involved in the trade within New York City. As one would expect, we get to see some very rare books, and given the niche of this particular business, we get to meet some fairly eccentric people. Young seems to believe that those two elements are enough.

They're not. On top of that, Young moves from specific issue—the process of hunting for rare books, the way the internet has changed the searching and the buying, the alleged death of the printed word—and interview subject with such speed that he's barely scratching the surface of each idea or person.

We get the basics: how the remaining booksellers (Chain stores and the internet have made most of the old stores disappear) rummage through homes and apartments, attend a major book fair, and wax nostalgic about the good, old days, when there were hundreds of independent bookstores (when they were just called "bookstores") throughout the city. Now, there are fewer than a hundred of them.

The movie doesn't just shift perspective. It also shifts its approach, spending a few minutes with a specific bookseller before discussing a broader issue. Young can't decide if his documentary is an intimate study of people, whose unique love of books as objects of culture has gone on for decades and been passed from generation to generation, or a more sweeping examination of the printed book as a cultural item, a changing industry, and an icon of obession.

As such, the movie touches upon fascinating ideas (how collecting has shifted into a form of cultural archiving, as well as how that archiving has expanded with the evolution of culture, using hip-hop as the sole example), only to drop them after a few nuggets of philosophy have been stated. It also visits a couple auction houses and private libraries to show how devoted some collectors are.

The topic and the people here are inherently intriguing, but the filmmaking keeps them only at that level of intrigue. The Booksellers feels like the work of a filmmaker who wants to say so much that the end result doesn't say much.

Note: Greenwich Entertainment is releasing The Booksellers as part of its virtual cinema initiative, in partnership with select movie theaters. You can watch the movie via the distributor's website and support your local cinema (e.g., the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago). For more information and to access the movie, click here.

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