Background
Errol Morris was born on 5 Frbruary 1948 in Hewlett, New York, United States. The child of a doctor and a musician.
Errol Morris was born on 5 Frbruary 1948 in Hewlett, New York, United States. The child of a doctor and a musician.
Morris attended the Putney School in Vermont before the University of Wisconsin (history) and the University of California at Berkeley (philosophy).
It was while there that he drifted to the Pacific Film Archive, for which he wrote program notes and became an enthusiast of such things as film noir. But Morris is not a natural storyteller. The superb noir essay The Thin Blue Line seemed dramatic enough to bring him Hollywood offers. But The Dark Wind (for Bobert Bedford) was a very unhappy experience, from which Morris was fired, and the film hardly released. It was said that he could not communicate with actors, but that really refers to a clash of artistic visions.
So Morris has gone in search of eccentricity as subject matter, which is fine. But his greatest challenge might be the real mainstream—not just people as bizarre as Fred Leuchter and Stephen Hawking, but lives as decent, “ordinary,” and mainstream as that led by Mr. Morris. If he could curb his need for oddballs, he might find a level of universality that could prompt his best work.
Not uncommonly, Errol Morris is interested in people like himself—in obsessives, trying to negotiate the intractable difficulties of life and the widespread yet indifferent misunderstanding of others. In some ways, his world is a little like that of Hal Hartley, but Morris is so much more vividly intelligent, and his sense of inquiry does so much to animate the style and structure of his work. No, really, the best comparison is with Chris Marker— though Morris lacks, as yet, the great man’s Borgesian serenity. Maybe that comes with time. And maybe when it does come it dispels the faintly aggressive air of intelligence for its own sake—the risk of smugness—that sometimes makes Morris seem an exploiter of his own raw material.