Last night the Performing Arts Center in the Arts District did what it does best: serve as a stage set for a glamour-seeking event. The opening night festivities of the Dallas International Film Festival felt decidedly upscale compared to last year’s opener, when Michael Cain addressed attendees from the bottom of the steps at Mockingbird Station, before the audience scattered into five different theaters at the Angelika Film Center for the five different opening night films.
This year there was one film – the mediocre docu-bio Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey – and lots of pre-film hoopla. The Winspear seemed to stiffen the backs of film lovers ever so slightly, and the implied dress for the evening was decidedly more formal than the previous year. And after last year’s attempt at populist cinema celebration – more opening night movies meant satisfying a broader spectrum of movie taste and more opening night guests – this year’s festival opener threw-in with Dallas’ penchant for society-driven, VIP-touting pseudo glamour. White Cadillac Escalades zipped extra VIPs down the block to the after party at the Crow Collection (reminding us that “walkability” is a concern that will never fret certain Dallasites), “red carpet” photo ops were offered to party-goers, and the Winspear concession stands offered up $7 Heinekens or Amstel Lights, as Wolfgang Puck and his exclusive contract to provide overpriced, ordinary concessions at the Performing Arts Center continued to fleece the good people of Dallas.
The opening night program kicked off a little more than a half-hour late, but when the lights first dimmed, what was most distracting was a large swath of empty seats in the Winspear’s orchestra section. Then, when chairman of the Dallas Film Society Michael Cain acknowledged the filmmakers attending this year’s fest, asking them to raise their hands, there was hardly a palm in the air in the orchestra — the filmmakers were up in the crowded balconies. Surely the Dallas IFF organizers merely wanted to capitalize on the glitz and glamour of the Winspear, but our Arts District proved once again to segregate patrons and artists rather neatly.
A video retrospective of Star Award recipient, Ann Margaret, was followed by a somewhat awkward speech by the former glamour girl who is celebrating her 50th year in show business. Margaret seemed unsure of what she should say to her Texas audience (wondering, it seemed, what she had done to deserve all this Texas-specific love), opting in the end to mention that she met Dallas Morning News movie critic Chris Vognar last week, asking him to stand for the crowd (“One of the most surreal moments of my life,” Vognar later admitted on Twitter). She then noted the movies that she filmed in Texas (State Fair, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) and finished by dishing out a compliment: “What I want to say about you guys is that Texans have a sense of honor, you don’t ask for anything, and you are true patriots” — punctuating the sentence with a nervous, yodel-like giggle and fleeing the spotlight.
If Margaret didn’t quite know how to play to her Texas audience, she was followed up by the high king of Texan naturals: H. Ross Perot. Perot led the honoring of Dallas Film Festival founder Liener Temerlin, whose homage was capped by a Texas star-studded video — featuring George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Stan Richards, Roger Staubach, Gerald Turner, and others — all of whom spoke highly of the man’s vision, humor, and wife.
Finally, time for the movie: Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey had great buzz coming off Sundance, but ended up being a rather lackluster, feel-good, conventional biographical documentary that pulled too many investigative punches to explore anything but an official, sanitized, rags-to-riches summation of the life of Kevin Clash, the man behind Elmo. What put me off from the start was the bluntly defined segregation of the film into “chapters,” similar to an A&E style biography, in which narrator Whoopi Goldberg brought us through various episodes of Clash’s young life and eventual work on Sesame Street. We learn his parents were good people, exceptionally supportive, and that Elmo owes much to Clash’s own innocent spirit, a pure enthusiasm that makes him someone we want to see succeed in life (and indeed, as we learn about his early life, we know he will).
Like the rest of the evening, Being Elmo is an homage to a man, not an exploration of a character, and some of the more difficult (and therefore more fascinating) aspects of Clash’s character are left unvetted. For example, the film touches on the irony that the man who is Elmo missed large portions of his daughter’s childhood because he was off entertaining other children. This fact, however, is only very politely touched upon. Clash also mentions that his daughter’s mother is his ex-wife, but we learn nothing about his wife or his divorce; it is another key personal fact that is barely noticeable.
These omissions are distracting because they speak to an inherent tension in Clash’s character: that the man’s whose life is dedicated to bringing about so much familial joy hasn’t had the smoothest of family lives. You would think the filmmakers would see that as a key topic if they were really out to capture the character of the man behind Elmo. When Clash shows a video at his daughter’s 16th birthday party featuring celebrities who wish her a happy birthday, the feeling is that of a father trying to leverage fame to make up for guilt for not being in his daughter’s life in those quieter, off-camera moments. It is an odd scene; its awkwardness isn’t acknowledged by the filmmakers, further calling attention to a sense that they are consciously sweeping some things under the rug.
What we get in Being Elmo is the impression that Clash is a swell guy, and his passion and drive for his work is admirable. That he came from a working-class housing development on the outskirts of Baltimore to create one of the most beloved personalities in the world is an incredible story of perseverance and a testament to the power of his unique personality. But that personality, that story, and the full-colored complexity of what was gained and lost through that life-long career – all those details are glossed over as the filmmakers force this story arc into a Disney-esque drive to a rosy happy ending. Being Elmo is a nod to an exceptional, well-deserving man, but after seeing the movie, we still have doubts that we really know him very well at all. That was just another opening night disappointment.
