Sidney Lumet's Benchmark: ‘Is It Fair?’
The film director Sidney Lumet, who died in 2011 at the age of 86, directed 44 feature films, beginning in 1957 with “12 Angry Men” and concluding 50 years later with “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” While his films received 46 Academy Award nominations and 6 Academy Awards, including 4 for “Network,” he never received a Best Director Oscar. He did, however, garner the academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
After watching Nancy Buirski’s remarkable documentary “By Sidney Lumet,” which will be shown on Sunday during the Hamptons International Film Festival, it’s hard not to feel he was gypped by the academy.
The genesis of “By Sidney Lumet” goes back to 2008, when American Masters, the PBS series, commissioned an interview with Lumet that resulted in 18 hours of footage shot over a period of several days. According to Ms. Buirski, “For several years, nothing happened with the film. They tried, but it never got off the ground.” Six years later she was meeting with Michael Kantor, the executive director of American Masters, to discuss other movie possibilities, when “he suggested I think about this one. I was thrilled with the idea.”
The resulting film consists of excerpts from the interview intercut with clips from dozens of Lumet’s films. Unlike many biographical documentaries, there are no talking heads, no film critics, and neither family, friends, nor admirers of the director. “I envisioned the structure almost from the beginning,” Ms. Buirski said. “I listened to sections of the interview and felt we had a window into his world and his soul. He was guiding us. Because of the nature, length, and depth of the interview, I felt we had an opportunity for Sidney to tell the story.”
The film opens with a scene from “12 Angry Men,” in which Henry Fonda plays the one juror who refuses to vote for a guilty verdict in a murder trial. The clip ends when another juror asks if Fonda really thinks the accused is innocent. Fonda’s reply: “I don’t know.” When asked if he was interested in dealing with the justice system, Lumet, characteristically downplaying the moral component of his work, said, “No, I was interested in doing my first movie.”
The clip from “12 Angry Men” is followed by Lumet’s recollection of an incident that occurred when he was stationed in India during World War II. While on a train that was stopped at a station, he saw a G.I. in an adjacent cabin grab an adolescent girl from the platform and lift her onto the train. When Lumet went to the next car, he discovered a gang rape of the girl in progress. When asked, Lumet refused to participate but faced a dilemma: “Do I do anything about this?” he asked himself at the time. He answers that question later in the film.
It’s clear from those two segments, and from the rest of the film, that moral and ethical dilemmas are at the heart of Lumet’s work and his view of the world. Reflecting on the process of listening to and organizing the material from the interview, Ms. Buirski said, “It’s not easy to find a storyline in a situation like this. The film could have gone in many different directions, because Sidney talks about a lot of things that aren’t in the movie. In all the hours of that interview there were certain things that began to come through that were important to him, and I wanted to make sure that’s what our movie dealt with.”
At one point during the interview, Lumet said, “I’m not directing a moral message. I’m directing that piece and those people, and if I do it well, the moral message will come through.” Near the end of the film, after a scene from “Serpico” in which Al Pacino is testifying before the Knapp Commission, Lumet mentions that he was often criticized for not having a thematic line in his work and for doing many different kinds of movies. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “There is always a bedrock concern: Is it fair?”
Lumet’s father was an actor best known for his work in Yiddish theater. Lumet himself made his radio debut at age 4 and his first stage appearance a year later. His mother, a dancer, died when he was a child, and the family was poor. Recalling those years, he quotes Bertolt Brecht: “First feed the face, then tell me right from wrong.”
He later admits he was lucky to be able to make movies about being poor and radical without having to live that kind of life. “I did not go down to Selma. My activism stopped with May Day marches. Instead I took such issues as the subject matter of my films.”
While at one point he said he doesn’t think art can overcome politics, that never stopped him from trying. He was particularly proud of “Daniel,” adapted by E.L. Doctorow from his own novel, “The Book of Daniel,” which was based on the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “I think it’s one of my best films, despite its critical and commercial failure. It’s a movie about what effect the passion of parents can have on the rest of their family.”
Of “Network,” he said, “For me and Paddy Chayefsky {the film’s writer}, the network was a metaphor for America and the corruption of the American spirit.” He noted Chayefsky’s prescience and said, “It’s only gotten worse,” referring obliquely to the war in Iraq.
Among the other films he discussed at some length are “The Verdict,” “Prince of the City,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Pawnbroker,” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” There were occasional departures from New York’s gritty streets and stories of failure and redemption, among them “The Wiz,” “Murder On the Orient Express,” and “Deathtrap,” much of which was filmed in and around East Hampton, where Mr. Lumet had a house where he spent weekends and summers from the 1960s.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Ms. Buirski, who divides her time between Durham, N.C., and New York City, was a documentary photographer and worked as a picture editor at Magnum Photos and The New York Times. “At both jobs, I really apprenticed with the best photographers in the world.”
In 1998 she founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which is devoted to the theatrical exhibition of nonfiction cinema and brings filmmakers and film enthusiasts to Durham every spring.
“I wanted to introduce people to the very eclectic universe of documentary film. People think documentaries have to look a certain way, and we made an effort to widen the definition of what a documentary can be.” “By Sidney Lumet” is a case in point. “I took a little risk with this film. I like to encourage documentary filmmakers and force myself to be as fresh as possible.”
She stepped down as festival director in 2008 to make her first film, “The Loving Story,” a documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, who were arrested for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and whose fight to overturn it led in 1967 to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on interracial marriage.
Ms. Buirski is currently developing “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” which will deal with the kidnapping and gang rape of a young black woman in Alabama in the 1940s and the involvement of Rosa Parks, whom the N.A.A.C.P. sent to investigate. Lumet would undoubtedly appreciate Ms. Buirski’s body of work.
“By Sidney Lumet” will be shown Sunday at 1:45 p.m. at the Regal East Hampton Cinema. A co-production of Augusta Films and American Masters, the film had support from RatPac Documentary Films, Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, Matador, and Anker Productions. The producers are developing a strategy for theatrical distribution, and the film will be shown on American Masters in the fall of 2016.