As chronic consumers of Hollywood product, we're used to having the big picture dumbed down to fit the presumed attention span of the average teenage boy. So we turn to independent films and, increasingly, to documentaries to show us more sophisticated takes on reality involving more complex narrative structures. An intelligent, risk-taking filmmaker is obliged to reinvent how stories are conventionally told, in order to follow their particular subject as it unfolds. Mediocre documentarians are not under this obligation to innovate, and so it was that producer-director Ryan Suffern threw his Finding Oscar into the Hollywood mangle with predictable results. See for yourself starting Friday at Opera Plaza.
If you're one of those idiots like me who has been painfully slow to admit the United States is not a nice country, it might come as a shock to you to be told that our government overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz of the sovereign state of Guatemala in 1954, at the behest of the United Fruit Company. After that coup, for nigh on 40 years, the people of Guatemala were in the grips of a very bloody civil war. In 1982 a military coup made Efrain Rios Montt president and his short-lived regime simply massacred citizens at will. That hideous era is over, but the military lives on. Exhumation of mass graves is only the first step in the slow, painstaking process of identifying bodies from skeletal remains in the pursuit of justice and emotional closure.
This is the shameful background of Finding Oscar , which is 80% about the compiling of a case against the perpetrators of a single massacre in a small village called Dos Erres in 1982, and 20% about two little boys who escaped being murdered that day. Both boys were crucial pieces of "living evidence" needed to attain conviction of the commandos who carried out this particular mass murder. So the film could've been called Oscar and Ramiro's Incredible Adventure , except that Suffern took his title directly from Sebastian Rotella's headline on the online news site ProPublica, which, along with This American Life, won a Peabody for the story.
Rotella appears as a talking head in Finding Oscar , but stunningly, the film doesn't acknowledge his scoop or his Peabody. His co-writer and fellow awardee Ana Arana similarly appears to supply background. Failing to attribute the source of his film creates a vacuum in which Suffern, by default, might be given credit where credit isn't due. What Suffern did was track down all the players, already identified, and get them to speak into his camera. Kudos for getting the story out there, for bringing Spielberg on as executive producer, for getting distribution.
The 94-minute film feels like it's been stretched from an hour-long TV show to a feature-length film. Not that there isn't plenty to report on, but Suffern isn't a reporter, lacks background in this subject, and has trouble synthesizing the story's several facets. His visuals are literal-minded and a bit hyperactive. Maybe he doesn't trust his material because it's not really his. He leans heavily on National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle, but doesn't mention she works not for the government but at Georgetown University, as an expert on human rights abuses in Latin America.
Spoiler alert: They do find Oscar, who had no idea he'd been kidnapped as a three-year-old by a Guatemalan military commando who raised him as his own son. So after we've been taken through Ronald Reagan's support for the murderous Montt, been shown many skeletons laid out on blankets for forensic purposes, heard the gruesome details of the 3 a.m. raid leading to death by sledgehammer and mass burial in a well, suddenly gears shift and it's happy time because Oscar's living the good life in Massachusetts, holding down two jobs and raising a family. As if America weren't the root of the problem. As if America were the answer. This jarringly gooey ending distracts from Guatemala's ongoing battle to regain its soul. Since Oscar has been found, so goes conventional Hollywood feel-good logic, why bring the audience down by drawing necessary conclusions about America's ongoing addiction to regime change? Why indeed.