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The "Indie" American Dream
by Stephen Wong
Chris Smith's hilarious, and sometimes sad documentary about wannabe horror auteur Mark Borchardt gained him critical acclaim and the coveted Grand Jury Prize at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, and rightfully so. On the surface Smith's film seems more like a mockumentary in the style of "Waiting for Guffman", as opposed to a documentary about one filmmaker's quest to create his ultimate dream film. This is due to the sheer lunacy of the film's subjects, filmmaker Borchart and his best bud Mike Shank, who could be unfairly categorized as Wisconsin white trash, but even more apt, a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meets Jay and a brain-baked Silent Bob.
Smith reportedly stumbled across Borchardt at the University of Wisconsin, where Borchardt was using
the editing equipment at the school to finish up another film. Smith was apparently so fascinated by
the odd filmmaker that he decided to document Mark's "creative process". American Movie follows that
grass-roots Wisconsin filmmaker as he attempts to create his feature film masterpiece "Northwestern".
With no money, a dead-end job and bills up to his nose, Borchardt decides the best approach to funding his
project is to finally finish his previously-abandoned horror short-film "Coven" (pronounced with heavy
Fargo-esque elocution as KOH-ven), and use the proceeds from tape sales to pay for
"Northwestern". There for moral support is his guitar-playing, allegedly drug-free friend Mike,
whose empty stare and glazed demeanor are so strange he doesn't seem real.
Though Smith could have taken the easy route, making a hilarious and demeaning documentary, using his subjects as the prime target of laughter, he's chosen a route with an even bigger payoff. As Smith unpeels the covers to this quirky, goofy tale, what's left is a story about a filmmaker whose lack of talent is overcome by his willingness to risk everything to accomplish his dreams.
Make no mistake, Borchardt is about as strange as they get. Says his brother of the filmmaker, "I always thought he'd grow up to be a stalker or a serial killer." In another scene, something out of a Farrelly Brothers flick, Mark is to ram an actor's head through an artificially "weakened" wooden cupboard, thus breaking it. After three futile attempts at full speed, head to wood, and bloodied fists pounding the board, a fourth take finally puts the poor dizzied actor's head through the board.
But Smith is able to move beyond the obvious stereotypes to show us someone that's driven by pure determination, in a quest for his American dream. To support himself and his three children while making his film, Mark delivers papers in the early morning, while vacuuming carpets in a mausoleum in the day. It's a commitment to an art form that, hidden amongst the poverty and struggle of blue-collar American life, is a lesson we could all learn from.
Stephen Wong, 1999
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