Smoke him out
Where in the World … is (a lot) better than it sounds. If you saw Morgan Spurlock’s first documentary, Super Size Me, you know to expect large dollops of humor somehow transforming into casual seriousness, laced with unique insight. In Size, Spurlock wanted to see what would happen if he ate only McDonald’s food for several months … and found out: he developed the beginnings of seven of the most serious diseases known to “modern” man, and stopped after his bevy of doctors told him he was killing himself.
Now comes the Osama bin Laden doc, in which Spurlock received beaucoup inoculations and terrorist-proofing physical training before he went off to Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and, yes, Pakistan, asking people straight-up if they knew where bin Laden was … and the answers to this seemingly ingenuous question show us more about the Middle East than hours of network news ever has.
The movie begins almost flippantly, making fun of itself and its naive quest, and almost imperceptibly shadens and deepens. Spurlock’s friendly, open-faced demeanor worked wonders with “ordinary” interviewees–he wisely includes only a few politicians and officials–most of whom say “Pakistan,” and then often proceed to tell him much more, with their faces as well as words.
Among those questioned are college students, rug merchants, vendors, journalists, U.S. troops, Orthodox Jews (who try to attack him) and Palestinians, whose candor and evasions speak volumes. Most profess to hate the U.S. government but not the American people–all, that is, but one out-and-out al-Qaida sympathizer. In its goofy, entertaining way, the film shows us another side–a populist side–to the countries whose names Americans are beginning to learn and take “seriously.” It’s a humanizing film about “ordinary” people caught up in the whirlwind of recent history.
Spurlock even gives us a partial happy ending. His conceit is that since his partner is pregnant, he wants to find out more than he knows about bin Laden. When he returns just in time to witness the birth of his child, the film ends happily, with Spurlock knowing a little bit more than he did. And just maybe the film audience, in an odd oblique way, does too.
