Even in his 90s, television writer and producer Norman Lear remains a major creative force, his legacy of groundbreaking sitcoms like All in the Family casting a large shadow over what passes for satire in the current TV landscape. You don’t need Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You to tell you that, and indeed this lively, loving but ultimately underwhelming documentary’s largest limitation is that it doesn’t do enough to dig beneath the surface of a legend. Anybody sympathetic to Lear’s liberal politics or familiar with his artistic track record will be interested throughout, but Lear himself remains a bit out of reach, an icon presented without enough context or insight.
The film was directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who have made two exceptional documentaries in recent years: 2010’s 12th and Delaware and 2012’s Detropia. (They’re probably best known for Jesus Camp, which was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2007.) Norman Lear is their first nonfiction profile piece, and it suffers from a problem that bedevils plenty of films in the genre: How do you present a life-spanning overview in a way that’s not a formulaic greatest-hits package?
Their answer, unfortunately, is to try a thematic device. Early in the movie, Lear mentions that he had to grow up at an early age because of a difficult family life—his father was a criminal—but that he has nonetheless retained a childlike wonder to this day. From that tidbit, Ewing and Grady construct a motif in which we occasionally see a young boy re-creating moments from Lear’s younger years on an empty stage sparsely decorated. It’s a bold move that simply doesn’t work, pulling the viewer out of Lear’s experience and turning the attention to an awfully theatrical gimmick. That structural misstep isn’t enough to sink Norman Lear, but it does hint at the filmmakers’ larger problem, which is that they can’t quite crack their subject’s inner world in order to bring together (and make sense of) the different threads of his life.
And what a life it is. Growing up Jewish on the East Coast, Lear was taught at an early age to “be a good provider,” a lesson he learned from watching his deadbeat father go to prison, forcing the young boy to move around from family member to family member, eventually landing with his grandparents. Serving in World War II because he hated the Nazis and their anti-Semitism so profoundly, he confessed later to relishing the idea of bombing Germans—whether they were innocent or not—into oblivion. When he returned to America and became a TV joke writer, Lear developed an interest in addressing taboo topics—racism, abortion—within his comedy, making sitcoms like All in the Family and Maude not just popular but socially relevant. Then in the 1980s, he stepped away from television to become an activist, speaking out against religious conservatism and, in 2001, purchasing one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and taking it on a tour across America so that people could reflect on how this country was formed.