Cast: Johnny Cash, Saul Holiff, June Carter Cash
Director: Jonathan Holiff
Country: Canada
Genre: Documentary
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for the San Antonio Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit http://safilm.com/ and follow the San Antonio Film Festival Review on Twitter at @safilm.
My Father and the Man in Black is a documentary that starts with a man named Jonathan Holiff, a big-time player in Hollywood who leaves it all behind when he finds out that his father Saul had just committed suicide. He didn’t know much about his father growing up. Only that he was the manager of the one and only Johnny Cash. When he finds out about a storage locker his father has, Holiff takes a trip there and discovers more about his father than he thought possible.
Respect has to be paid to Holiff for his attempt to bring us an important, and not well-known, piece of music history. What’s clear throughout the piece is his insistence on the need of this story to be told.
Respect has to be paid to Holiff for his attempt to bring us an important, and not well-known, piece of music history. What’s clear throughout the piece is his insistence on the need of this story to be told. And he’s right. It’s not every day something like this comes around. But a great story is virtually nothing without a great presentation to back it up. My Father and the Man in Black is now the newest example of that.
This interesting story, that is bright enough to shine through and grab our attention, practically gets left in the dust due to some mismanaged filmmaking. Honestly, it’s almost unfair to say this. I can understand why Holiff wanted to tell this story himself. It’s his father, and it’s his life. It’s not just a story about a man that used to work for a music icon; it’s also about a son that basically re-discovers his father. I will say this: if Holiff wanted to make this film to validate himself, then I congratulate him for doing so. If he wanted to make this film to do that and/or to entertain and educate an audience, then he failed.
It all comes down to poor decisions, and sadly they all stem from Holiff appointing himself as the puller of all the strings. The first and most criminal string that he pulled was making himself the narrator. Today’s documentaries have shown that a riveting story can be told without an official voice, and maybe that should have been considered in this matter. Hollif’s voice is monotone and weirdly distracting. Some of the way he reads off the dialogue (that he also wrote himself) is so painful to hear that the cringe reflex gets a swift kick in the shins. When it isn’t being told through pictures, actual footage and audio recordings of the people involved, the story is surrounded by some poorly filmed wraparound footage. It’s awkward to see, and it also brings up another lesson: just because you can shoot with film doesn’t mean you should.
It all comes down to poor decisions, and sadly they all stem from Holiff appointing himself as the puller of all the strings. The first and most criminal string that he pulled was making himself the narrator.
There’s a small middle section where the focus of the documentary is shown through nothing but footage and recordings. And that was the best part. The overall mark is a result that truly brings up sadness. There’s no denying that Holiff worked hard to bring this all to fruition. As I’ve said before, it’s almost not fair to criticize what he did. It’s his saga, and who are we to say we could have done it better? Emotional release can be everything to people. But being in the technical age that we live in today, there are so many ways to achieve that release, to tell a true-life story.
My Father and the Man in Black is a fascinating story, but a poor documentary. It’s get lost in Holiff’s hands, and the result brings about a word that I never ever thought would be put into the same category as Johnny Cash: boring. If Holiff would have opened up his reigns and put it into the hands of filmmakers that truly have a feel for documentaries, this could have been something. At the same time, it might be a little silly to think that anybody in the same position wouldn’t do the same thing.
[notification type=”star”]42/100 ~ BAD. My Father and the Man in Black is a fascinating story, but a poor documentary. It’s get lost in Holiff’s hands, and the result brings about a word that I never ever thought would be put into the same category as Johnny Cash: boring.[/notification]
