A typical narrative film has to work very hard in order to pull off a twist, because it's pretty easy to see them coming these days. Documentaries, however, have the advantage of taking their material from reality, which is often much stranger than fiction. Sometimes the unexpected turns are truly unexpected, as they were in investigative docs like "Tickled" and "Icarus," which took their filmmakers down unplanned rabbit holes. And then there are films like "Mr. Death," where the filmmaker knew from the outset exactly what he had to work with, and built the film's narrative accordingly.
Errol Morris's films are largely based around interviews, and his films are mostly profiles of eccentric and unusual individuals. "Gates of Heaven" is about the people involved in the upkeep of a pet cemetery, "Vernon, Florida" looks into the lives of various oddball citizens, and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" takes on four profiles at once - a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robotics expert, and a mole-rat researcher. "Mr. Death," which is about Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a self-styled expert in execution systems, seems to be no different. Leuchter is a self-taught, strange little man who is obsessed with his work. He rattles off carefully memorized facts and figures, clearly deeply insecure about his lack of education and claims of his ignorance. We learn that he makes his living repairing and upgrading capital punishment equipment to various prisons.
Initially, Leuchter seems perfectly benign, despite his morbid profession. He frames his obsession as humanitarian, intended to prevent the suffering of the condemned due to faulty or improperly maintained equipment. As he discusses his upbringing and his work, he's even sympathetic at times. And if you didn't know anything else about Leuchter, you might even be inclined to find him admirable, even if he's clearly constructed his own little self-aggrandizing personal mythology. And that's when Ernst Zundel and the Neo-Nazis show up in the movie. Errol Morris completely pulls the rug out from under his unsuspecting audience when he reveals that Leuchter is one of the primary pseudo-scientific sources behind certain Holocaust denial claims involving execution methods. Leuchter was happy to help in Zundel's efforts to undermine the historical record, even convinced to spend his honeymoon exploring Auschwitz and taking samples for analysis. He considered his findings evidence that the gas chambers were never in operation there.
What's fascinating is that Leuchter honestly doesn't understand why people are so upset with him. He thinks he's revealing the truth, having bought into his own hype to such an extent that he doesn't realize that his methodology for conducting his experiments is deeply flawed. He doesn't seem to be an anti-Semite, but rather someone too susceptible to praise and positive attention. When the Holocaust deniers come to call, they appeal to his purported expertise, offering him the legitimacy that he craves. Errol Morris doesn't do anything to portray Leuchter as morally suspect or malicious. Rather, it's the banality and ignorance of his evil that is so frightening.
What Morris does do is to build a narrative around Leuchter that helps you to understand how his mind works first, before revealing what he's done and gradually adding other viewpoints into the film to counter his claims. Morris is famous for - and even notorious for - using cinematic devices like reenactments in his documentaries. Here, he refrains from anything too showy, with one exception. He pairs audio of an actual Holocaust expert taking apart Leuchter's scientific methods with footage of Leuchter stealing samples in one of the Auschwitz gas chambers. And at a particularly dissonant moment, Morris freeze-frames, punctuating the absurdity of what Leuchter's self-aggrandizement has brought him to.
Some have mistaken "Mr. Death" for an anti-Semitic work because Morris doesn't outright condemn Leuchter in the film. I think that makes "Mr. Death" all the more effective, because Leuchter really is so terribly ordinary, and Morris allows him to bloviate and spin his justifications on camera in such a way that he ends up revealing how small and sad he really is. The misinformation that he authors and the ability of that information to cause harm are terrible, and Morris makes it clear they are, but the man himself is a far more curious and complex question. And these days, a terribly timely one too.
What I've Seen - Errol Morris
Gates of Heaven (1978)
Vernon, Florida (1981)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
A Brief History of Time (1991)
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
Mr. Death:The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
The Fog of War (2003)
Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
Tabloid (2010)
The Unknown Known (2013)
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