Making documentaries about well known and respected people in their various fields is tough, because, as in the case of this movie, if you are as great a filmmaker as David Lean the public already has a perception of your subject. This makes finding a new angle with which to talk about their lives and careers a difficult task, but director Barnaby Thompson does an admirable job tackling the story of a director whose legacy casts a large shadow over the history of British cinema, to the extent that three of his films are in the BFI’s top five of their Top 100 British films list.
Told in chronological order, the film starts from Lean’s strict upbringing in a religious household and his unhappy childhood struggling with what would now be diagnosed as dyslexia and his cruel and domineering father ; then his beginnings in the British film industry working his way up from being an editor to a director; moving then to his British films (e.g. Brief Encounter and his Dickens adaptations); on to his work internationally (a period which features his best known works such as The Bridge On The River Kwai and Lawrence Of Arabia); his career slump post the early 1970s; and finally the latter period of his career and his death.
The reasoning behind the title, is that in Thompson’s eyes Lean was a maverick in every sense of the word, because he fought for his artistic vision even when actors and producers were against it, and he made the kinds of films that he believed in. This coupled with the sheer sense of scale that his best works have in common, is why every Lean film feels so deliberate.
Thompson uses a mixture of archive footage of Lean’s interviews and film shoots, excerpts from his movies themselves, interviews with directors past and present talking about what Lean’s work means to them (e.g. Alfonso Cuaron, Stephen Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Denis Villneuve, Francis Ford Coppola, Wes Anderson, Nia Dacosta etc), as well as narration from Cate Blanchett and Kenneth Branagh who portrays Lean in voiceover.
Thompson’s mixed media approach paints a portrait of a man who, ironically, despite having a brilliantly compassionate sense of character when it came to his art, lead a private life where he struggled to form relationships with his various wives and his son Peter.
In Thompson’s eyes, Lean developed the maniacal perfectionism that enabled him to produce his masterpieces, because unlike a film set, Lean couldn’t control human nature or his own emotional lows. Coming from a home life starved of affection, Lean turned his neglect outwards, developing his exactingly precise nature when it came to his films as a rebuke to his father and peers telling him that he would never amount to anything.
Subjectively, the most enjoyable scenes in the documentary are the ones where the audience is giving a peek behind the scenes into Lean’s shoots, where the director’s resourcefulness, for example recreating Moscow on the beaches of Southern Spain during the production of Doctor Zhivago, because he couldn’t film it in the Soviet Union as Pasternak’s novel had been banned in its country of origin.
The main flaw with the documentary however, is that we are treated to far too many scenes where Lean’s most private and explicit love letters are read out, which from a personal point of view came across more as voyeuristic than it did informative. Lean’s filmmaking career was so interesting that it makes you wonder why Thompson didn’t focus on, frankly, far more intriguing topics such as Lean’s falling out of critical favour during the New Hollywood period of the 1970s, or his failed productions of Mutiny On The Bounty and Nostromo instead.
Overall, Maverick is a solid documentary that while containing nothing new for Lean superfans, is a good enough introduction to his work for newcomers. If this documentary is responsible for bringing in new audiences to Lean’s movies, then that can only be classed as a good thing.
