Apparently my first time around with a Laura Poitras doco. This is the media interviewing the media as the original sources take their stories to their graves and thereby avoid deathbed confessions to Errol Morris.
Let me say upfront that interviewing Seymour Hersh was a worthy and thankless task. However there is so much padding — stock 1960s footage including the classic Việt Nam bombing sequence but not the now-controversial napalm girl, typewriter clacking accompanying ancient documentary evidence, grabs from many of his previous interviews — that it seems Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus came away with very little usable footage. Hersh refuses to dish on any source who is or may still be alive, leaving us with journalism war stories not so far from the ancient ones spun by Hunter S. Thompson, Woodward and Bernstein. As always with these docos, more dates were needed to anchor things in history.
Hersh is a funny no-sacred-cows kinda bloke. It gets amusing when he starts digging into corporations with Jeff Gerth while Hersh is at the New York Times; they start with Gulf and Western's accounts and proceed to the Times's, so of course he was going to get fired. Hersh is only thin-skinned when they try to discuss his wife or the shenanigans around his cash-in book on JFK and Monroe. His article that broke the My Lai massacre story was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday 1969-11-13; I was sufficiently disengaged to wonder if Roger Ebert had a review in the same edition. Uncharitably it also brought to mind Leonard Cohen's The Stranger Song: the film doesn’t get to the heart of this or any other matter.
The New Yorker years are glossed over apart from Abu Ghraib; this really is a greatest hits compilation. I would've enjoyed more time with several of the auxiliary characters — General Taguba for instance. They don't delve into Hersh's presence on Substack or whether he's given any thought to leaving.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis at one of his erstwhile employers. She says they interviewed him 42 times for this project. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. He was never cinematically feted, unlike the others mentioned above. Photographic evidence is now obsolete, with all forms of evidence soon to follow (?).
