The Imposter

Film (2012)

Cast: Adam O’Brian, Anna Ruben, Cathy Dresbach, Alan Teichman, Ivan Villanueva, Maria Jesus Hoyos, Anton Marti, Amparo Fontanet, Ken Appledorn

In the mid 1990s, Nicholas Barclay, a blond blue-eyed boy of thirteen who lives with his mother and sister in Texas, goes missing. Three years later, the family receives a call from Spain indicating that he has been found. Could the presumptive, grown Nicholas, despite his brown eyes and dark skin, actually be accepted as the real thing? The return to Texas and the ensuing complications fuel the unsettling unwinding of the tale.

This study of a family’s loss and apparent willingness to overlook the obvious in order to heal their wounds provides an interesting psychological study. They are vulnerable and receptive to the point of blindness. From the perspective of the seemingly grown Nicholas who insinuates himself into their lives, the study is doubly loaded. He is vulnerable, yet deceptive, in an equally heartbreaking combination.

What follows this initial setup forms the meat of the development section of this film and it is, like all good tragedy, a believable and appropriately wrenching follow-up to the conditions which precede it.

In the film’s denouement, one gets a final telling of the presumptively reappearing protagonist’s outlook through his own history, and it is telling indeed.

The subject of this film is psychologically and emotionally gripping, but its rendition, here, has too much of a TV reality-melodrama about it to have a more penetrating effect. Staged scenes are interlaced with pieces of actual footage in a way that makes it difficult to see it either as pure drama or as documentary. It comes across, then, as a kind of cooked up low-key thriller rather than as a cinematic high.

The overly portentous and haunting music (and sound design) add to this cheapening of the effect. As well, there are editing choices that so intentionally create focal anxiety that they subvert the more nuanced demands of drama.

As a result, this film itself comes across as unable to decide whether it is drama or reportage, and lands as an less satisfying hybrid, a form of docutainment.

One could render reportage dramatically as well as responsibly – Inside Job (2010), the superb documentary, directed by Charles H. Ferguson, about the roots of the 2008 financial crisis, is a fine example – without these kinds of unecessary melodramatic additions.

A more bizarre narrative rendering – Tabloid, Errol Morris’ recent film – tells the story behind its news stories hauntingly and dramatically, and with a menancingly evocative sound track by John Kusiak, but, again, does not weaken itself with overly histrionic techniques that, seeking to get an additional rise out of the audience, compromise the integrity of both dramatic and reportorial dimensions in one fell swoop.

– BADMan