Mark Reviews Movies: MIKE WALLACE IS HERE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 1, 2019

The first of many interviews we see featuring Mike Wallace, the late journalist and media personality who was best known as a long-time correspondent on "60 Minutes," has the man grilling Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly, of course, is the now-disgraced (but always disgraceful) political commentator who is best known for having blown a lot of hot air on Fox News—before the network dumped him after it was revealed that he settled multiple accusations of sexual harassment to the tune of millions of dollars. Wallace starts by taking O'Reilly to task, albeit in that sneaky way he had of forming his criticism as a question, instead of just outright saying what might be on his mind.

The gist of the critique is that O'Reilly isn't actually a journalist, right? He couldn't possibly believe himself to be a legitimate reporter of the news, right?

That's when O'Reilly, after saying he does indeed believe that he's a journalist, decides to turn the tables on his interviewer. If O'Reilly is bad for journalism, then surely Wallace is, too. After all, O'Reilly gained some attention for hosting "Inside Edition," a tabloid magazine-style show that was modeled—like so many that came about after the network staple's resounding success in the ratings—after "60 Minutes." O'Reilly asks the tough questions of the people he interviews, just as Wallace has for his entire career as a media man. How did O'Reilly get to be this way? He argues that he learned it from Wallace.

If we're expecting a lionization of Wallace here, as a hard-hitting reporter and a no-nonsense interviewer, the opening segment of Mike Wallace Is Here shatters that thought. It's one thing for a serious journalist or a studied adjudicator of the state of the news media to question whether or not Wallace and what he represented have had a positive influence on the state of journalism. It's another matter to hear O'Reilly, a man who clearly has provided nothing of any value to the Fourth Estate, call Wallace his inspiration.

Maybe O'Reilly learned all the wrong lessons from the eponymous subject of this probing and formally ingenious documentary. He learned something from Wallace, though, and that alone says something worth exploring.

The film, directed by Avi Belkin, does a few things that twist our expectations, starting with the way that O'Reilly interview goes. We anticipate a verbal beat-down of the man, but instead, we get a pointed judgment—not what is said, but who says it.

When the narrative proper begins, we hear Wallace talking about his childhood, the son of immigrant parents from a Boston suburb and from whom he learned some opposing personality traits. If we're anticipating a straightforward biography, though, that never quite happens. The stuff about Wallace's childhood is mainly here to reveal that he had acne as a young man and often feared being in public because of it. At the start of his career, Wallace would say that he had a face for radio, where he began. It's to put in our minds, right from the start, that such insecurity would become a driving force for the man's life.

The rest of the film does go through his career in a mostly chronological fashion, but that's not especially Belkin's focus. The real coup of the filmmaking here is that Belkin restricts the material only to archival footage, most of it from thousands of hours of footage from the hundreds of interviews Wallace did—on his own late-night shows "Night Beat" and "The Mike Wallace Interview" during the 1950s, as well as "60 Minutes" beginning in 1968.

There are no talking heads, expounding upon the greatness of Wallace's career or his personal failings or the debate about his brand of journalism, unless such talk is present in the archival footage. Such material is there—during a panel debate, when a newspaper reporter laughs at being asked if Wallace is a good journalist, and within the interviews, especially when Wallace's colleagues, such as Morley Safer (who points out that his fellow "60 Minutes" correspondent can be "a prick," while Barbra Streisand simply calls him "a son of a bitch") and Lesley Stahl and Barbara Walters, set out to ask him questions. The way Belkin gets that material into the film, though, is inventive and maintains the flow of what's basically an extended conversation—about Wallace, about his work, about his shortcomings, about the times he lived through, about his influence on the media landscape.

With editor Billy McMillin, that's basically what Belkin creates here: a conversation. The effect is insightful, both in how it shows the effectiveness, as well as the perils, of Wallace's interviewing technique and in how it reveals the man—through his own words and his own feelings spoken by others.

Belkin catches Wallace in a pointed moment of hypocrisy. When he's asked about how many wives he has had, Wallace says it's a stupid question, and immediately after, the film cuts to the man asking the exact question of Larry King. There's another, perhaps more telling moment when he asks Leona Helmsley if she has gotten over the death of her son. When she starts crying, Wallace, who lost one of his sons in the 1960s, realizes he has overstepped and apologizes—the only time we see him do such a thing. The look on his face shows much more than any words could speak.

Through this footage, assembled with such precision, we come to understand Wallace as an interviewer and as a human being with many faults, multiple insecurities, and total dedication to his work. While one interview with Safer, late in Wallace's career, goes deeper than others, the film is at times surreal in seeing and hearing assorted famous people almost speak for Wallace (In addition to the moment with Helmsley, Johnny Carson explains that he's only comfortable in front of an audience, which seems to be the case with the man interviewing him).

If conversations defined Wallace's life and career, here's a final one, in which the man is essentially talking with himself through his own voice and the voices of dozens of recognizable people. Mike Wallace Is Here doesn't come to praise or condemn its subject. The film simply but intensely does what the man did to so many others: It questions him.

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