‘Raise hell’ and ‘mike wallace’: two film reviews

By Tom Jozwik

Published Oct. 25, 2019

With the 2019 cinematic stories of Molly Ivins and Mike Wallace, the Milwaukee Film Festival continues its tradition of providing patrons with outstanding documentaries.

Ivins, the widely published Texas-born columnist, was a political humorist of the first water. I’m ashamed I knew so little about her before taking in “Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins” at the festival and I’m still amazed the movie filled the Times Cinema on a summery Saturday morning. Obviously a lot of people knew, and appreciated, Ivins’ rapier wit.

In “Raise Hell,” that wit is quite constantly on display via interview and speech excerpts and had the audience at the Times laughing heartily. Fellow Texan and former CBS anchorman Dan Rather, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow and others provide assessments and recollections that cumulatively cover the whole of Ivins’ life. It’s just too bad that the columnist, so delightfully sarcastic on the subjects of George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, the Texas legislature, etc., isn’t around to skewer America’s current Commander in Chief  (Ivins died of cancer, at age 62, in 2007).

“Raise Hell” is excellent, but the more serious Wallace doc is even better. “Mike Wallace Is Here” focuses  quite tightly on the broadcast journalist’s professional life. We see the no-nonsense purveyor of the ask-the-hard-questions philosophy interviewing and being interviewed and, as with “Raise Hell,” our interest never wanes.

Although “Mike Wallace” zeroes in on the newsman (best known for his work on “60 Minutes”) plying his trade, we do learn of Wallace’s embarrassing adolescent battle with acne, his several marriages, the tragic death of his first child. We hear the documentary’s subject second-guessing his own workaholic ways and see some of his early TV efforts: hosting game shows, trying his hand at acting, shilling for one product or another.

It’s a safe bet no 2019 film will have a more star-studded supporting cast than “Mike Wallace,” as its co-stars in interviewee roles include President Richard Nixon, playwright Arthur Miller, artist Salvador Dali, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, human rights activist Malcolm X, “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, singer-actress Barbra Streisand—even the Ayatollah Khomeini. At times, uncannily, aspects of his interviewee’s lives parallel Wallace’s own, a circumstance viewers are left to figure out for themselves.

Both the Wallace and Ivins docs merit an A grade.