FLIPSIDE - Mark Reviews Movies

Flipside, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 30, 2024

There's a stream-of-consciousness quality to Flipside that's equal parts admirably intriguing and frustratingly shallow. Director Christopher Wilcha doesn't attempt to disguise what he's doing with this piecemeal documentary, which is made up of various projects he started and never completed over the course of his career. The big question, then, is whether or not a career that amounts to a lot of unfinished work can actually be called a career in that field.

There are lot of questions posed by the filmmaker here. Some of them are about the distinctions between collecting and hoarding, and others are about the meaning of life. They're put forth by assorted stories Wilcha tried telling over the years and the people he has met whose stories appeared worth telling, and they all point back to the director. He doesn't know exactly what he's doing, in terms of both the movie he's making and his professional life more generally, but in examining these halted projects, perhaps he will get at some answers or, at least, the right questions to explore later.

Depending on one's view of this approach, this is either introspective or a lot of navel-gazing. To his credit, Wilcha is as interested in his assorted subjects, whose own lives and careers have been defined for better and/or for worse by creative pursuits, as he is in his own existential crisis. Whether or not the filmmaker's philosophical and self-reflective musings actually make for a compelling arc to this documentary, the specific stories within it occasionally are.

First, there's the case of Herman Leonard, a photographer whose work focused on jazz musicians at the height of that musical movement. He captured candid moments of the likes of Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra, and in speaking to Wilcha, the photographer explains how the negatives of most of these shots sat under his bed for decades. At a certain point, Leonard realized the photos were of some value as a matter of history, and he became fairly well-regarded years and years later.

As that was happening for him, though, Leonard was diagnosed with terminal cancer. How does a person reflect on a career belatedly acknowledged while also confronting one's imminent, inevitable death?

That's partly the query Wilcha considered with this project, which he quickly announces via voice-over was never finished. He has piles of hard drives in his home, each one full of footage of planned documentaries that never came to fruition. With that confession, the movie becomes as much a biography of Wilcha, who shunned the idea of marketing in his youth but has since become a successful director of commercials. This isn't what he wanted for his career, but after getting married and having two kids, life got a bit in the way of his dreams.

Wilcha goes through a selection of those proposed and shuttered documentaries. One was to revolve around a writer who just landed a book deal, only for her to become stuck with a terrible case of writer's block. Wilcha can empathize, of course, and he does here, reflecting how he imagined following someone else's creative process might spur his own. The double irony, obviously, is that neither the author or the filmmaker got what they wanted out of their big opportunities.

A lot of this does start to feel like Wilcha rambling and scrambling for inspiration, which is the point, of course, but also comes across as a string of dead ends—which is also, to some degree, another point. The main focus for a while is a record shop in the filmmaker's New Jersey hometown. Wilcha worked there as a teenager before going to college, discovered a passion for music there, and still feels a nostalgic connection to the store and its owner. Upon returning to the shop, Wilcha comes up with the idea to make a movie about it, hopefully bringing attention and maybe some business to the now-struggling store. He drops that project, too, only to return about a decade later to discover that the shop is still having trouble, thanks to some local competition, and that the owner might be a bit too content to keep records instead of selling them.

It's kind of amusing, fascinating, and sad—watching this store slowly fail, despite the success of its neighbor. However, that story isn't enough for Wilcha, who offers other diversions, including interviews with Judd Apatow, who gave the filmmaker a reason to move his family to Los Angeles and end up taking those advertising gigs, and TV writer David Milch, who suggested Wilcha make the documentary about Leonard. Some of this seems like the non-fiction equivalent of name-dropping, especially when Wilcha spends a lengthy section on his efforts to help radio personality Ira Glass bring his show to television. Visiting Milch in an assisted-living facility after his Alzheimer's diagnosis doesn't quite sit right, either, especially since it's not necessary for the narrative Wilcha is barely telling.

For the most part, though, Wilcha comes across as sincere in his aims, as adrift as they are, and his outlook on those who try and fail but keep trying, because he's in that position, too. It might be unfair to criticize Flipside for being too messy and uncertain, since the messiness and the uncertainty are a reflection of the documentary's purpose, but it is in ways that turn the movie into a case of dueling intentions.

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