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Capsule review: ‘Wild Blue Yonder’
Whiney and watery, Celia Maysles’ navel-gazing documentary can’t break out of its smothering and tedious insularity, even though the father she seeks to learn about is David Maysles, a giant, with brother Albert, of vérite cinema (“Grey Gardens,” “Gimme Shelter”). She seems to believe that her last name is sufficient justification for her movie to exist. It is not. David Maysles died unexpectedly when Celia was 7, and somehow she never knew that he and her uncle were one of the most important filmmaking teams in the medium’s history. Now a young adult fostering an identity, she embarks on a “daughter’s search for her father,” she says through conspicuously forced tears. The one dramatic twist amid the inertia — Albert Maysles, creepily competitive, won’t share with his niece unseen footage of David’s portrait of his own father, titled “Blue Yonder” — doesn’t amount to much. The result is faintly engaging and understandably brief (60-plus minutes), yet fails to blossom into anything of universal relevance.
2:30 p.m. Tuesday, 7:30 p.m. Friday, Alamo South
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