My Psychedelic Love Story
Directed by Erroll Morris
Featuring Joanna Harcourt-Smith and Timothy Leary
Running Time: 1 Hour and 41 Minutes
Rating: TV-14
by Ian Hrabe
Errol Morris was the first documentarian who made me realize that documentaries could be just as artful and impactful as any feature film. I can’t remember why I watched The Thin Blue Line in high school, but I vividly remember the experience of watching that film. I watched as many of his docs as I could get my hands on at the public library, notably Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven, and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Morris’s quirky, creative, non-fiction style was a far cry from the documentaries I was used to seeing in the classroom, and though his most acclaimed documentary--2003’s The Fog of War--was way over my head when I saw it, he still set the bar for what I thought documentaries should aspire to.
Nearly two decades later, I have just watched Errol Morris’s latest documentary and am fully convinced that the filmmaking world has left him in the dust. My Psychedelic Love Story--Morris’ chronicle of Timothy Leary’s ex-lover (and potential CIA plant) Johanna Harcourt-Smith--is the documentary incarnation of “OK Boomer.” Though Morris injects a lot of creative energy via splicing together archival footage to emulate an acid trip, it’s all window dressing to what is an unbearably dull story. The issue here is twofold: Errol Morris can’t wring a compelling story out of the footage he shot and that’s likely because Johanna Harcourt-Smith comes off as the most annoying person on earth. It’s a lose-lose situation.
That said, the film stumbles right out of the gate by assuming the audience was around in the 1960s when Timothy Leary was waging his campaign of peace, love and LSD. While Morris certainly doesn’t need to drown us in exposition, the absolute lack of context is likely to be aggravating to anyone who isn’t a Baby Boomer. As a result, this feels like a film made for a different time that is totally oblivious to the world we are currently living in. A movie about incredibly privileged people doing incredibly privileged things under the guise of some sort of acid trip romance.
Morris’s interview with Joanna Harcourt-Smith is brutal stuff. It’s like watching someone tell you about a dream they had. Or in this case, a years long drug trip. The interview goes off on tedious tangents any chance it gets, and while there is supposed to be this central mystery about whether or not Harcourt-Smith was actually a CIA plant designed to get Leary--who was living in exile in Switzerland--back into US custody, this is basically an afterthought. Instead we get eye-roll inducing breakdowns of the tarot deck and the ramblings of an incredibly unreliable narrator. Morris clearly thinks Harcourt-Smith is much more charming than she actually is, and the result is a deeply myopic piece of filmmaking that serves no one.
Where Morris’s recent documentaries have mined the lives of America’s modern villains--Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McNamara, Steve Bannon--he uses a relatively tender approach here as a sort of tribute to his subject. You can hear the adoration in his voice, and it’s actually kind of sweet, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a film that was this much of a drag and elicited this many actual groans. Some stories are begging to be told, and some just flat out aren’t, especially when they are lacking the basic context needed to make that story compelling.
Premieres on Showtime tonight, November 29 at 9pm eastern.
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