Proudly billed as “the first official feature documentary to explore the remarkable life and career of Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart,” Kathryn Ferguson’s “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” makes terrific use of its access to the actor’s friends, family, and personal archives, but the burden of this film’s estate-approved purpose — its self-imposed obligation to offer the definitive history of a man who millions of movie lovers can see with their eyes closed — has an unfortunate tendency to blunt its steady drumbeat of intimate details. The result is a womb-to-tomb biography that uses Bogart’s own words to cover the most basic facts about his life; it’s an establishing shot that strains for the nuance of a close-up.
If attempting to cover the full span of a person’s life in less than 100 minutes can feel like a fool’s errand regardless of the subject, the inimitable “Casablanca” star offers several extra challenges for good measure. Not only did Bogart live one of the more fascinating and public American lives of the 20th century (brief and eternal all at once), but he was also born with the kind of face that tells you a man’s story just by looking at it. Be that as it may, Ferguson is at least determined to show us that face in a different light, and it’s a testament to the “Nothing Compares” director’s talent and curiosity that she’s able to do that as a hired gun in spite of the parameters she must have received from the Universal Pictures Content Group executives who first hatched the project.
The first of Ferguson’s two big ideas was to have Bogart tell us his story himself, an effect she achieved not with the Satanic forces of AI, but rather by hiring someone to impersonate the late actor’s voice to the best of their ability. Kerry Shale does a fine job of infusing the narration with a sense of direct feeling (though the nature of his source material is never specified), but Bogart wouldn’t have been Bogart if anyone else could sound just like him, and Shale isn’t even all that close.
That puts “Life Comes in Flashes” in a rough spot right at the start, as the film leads with the exact sort of second-hand phoniness that it was made to defy. But Ferguson does what she can to make that bug into a feature — or at least into a less distracting bug — by immediately steering towards her subject’s flesh and blood fallibility. Listening to “Bogart” lament the unfair reality that “actors can’t have human frailties like other people,” it’s easy to separate the soft-bellied New York searcher from the hard-boiled tough he played on screen. What Shale is able to capture of Bogart’s inner voice helps compensate for how little his impersonation reflects Bogart’s outer voice.
It’s clear that Bogart’s inner voice had a lot to say over the course of his life, which only makes it more frustrating that Ferguson’s documentary is so focused on the course of his life. “Life Comes in Flashes” is far too personal to risk feeling like a Wikipedia page in motion, but the film’s inflexibly linear cadence tends to flatten the peaks and valleys of Bogart’s career into an unmoving stream of events. And while Ferguson gets additional input from some of the actor’s wives, children, and collaborators (all non-archival interviews are audio only to help preserve a sense of immersion), her insight is — by dint of the film’s design — often limited to what Bogart ever allowed himself to write in his journals or say on the record.
It’s certainly amusing to hear that he only slicked back his hair to look like “a 42nd Street version of Rudolph Valentino,” just as it’s intriguing to hear that he was disappointed that his time in the Navy didn’t leave him with a fuller sense of himself; it’s certainly more insightful than the quote his Wikipedia page offers about the same time period: “At eighteen, war was great stuff. Paris! Sexy French girls! Hot damn.” But there are so many other parts that Bogart will go on to play, and so little time to cover them all, and so we’re off to the next chapter in his life before we can meaningfully absorb the one at hand.
Certain tendencies accumulate over the years (e.g. Bogart’s lifelong distaste for authority), however, and Ferguson makes a tremendous effort to weave those tendencies against the historical backdrop of her subject’s life. Case in point: While Bogart wasn’t much interested in Communism, he was so bothered by the Red Scare on principle that he felt compelled to speak up. Alas, there’s an almost Forrest Gumpian mismatch between the roles that Bogart played in the public eye and the depth to which this film can afford to focus on any of them, and since Bogart never saw himself as the living embodiment of post-war cynicism or a bulwark against censorship or anything else like that, Ferguson is likewise reluctant — or unable — to place the actor in a greater social context. “Life Comes in Flashes” often makes it seem as though the actor just bumbled from one iconic part to another, motivated largely by his spite for Jack Warner and the state of his latest marriage.
Which brings us to the second and most compelling of Ferguson’s big ideas: The notion that a leathery crank like Bogart might be easier to understand through the eyes of the women he loved. And not just Lauren Bacall, but also his first three (significantly less famous) spouses. “Life Comes in Flashes” slows down to focus on each of them, with a special attention paid to what Bogart was looking to get from each of those relationships — and what he could tolerate during them. The backstage spat that blossomed into his marriage with Helen Menken is a telling example of his penchant for hardball (which sometimes bled into cruelty), while his extremely turbulent relationship with the actress Mayo Methot anticipated his need for the emotional stability he found with Bacall.
“Life Comes in Flashes” doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the more salacious details of Bogart’s story, but it’s also not as bowdlerized as some viewers might expect from an estate-approved doc. When it comes to a guy like Bogart, who brought a crooked unflappability to even his most romantic characters, there isn’t a lot of pressure to frame him as an angel, and Ferguson is naturally compelled by the rawness of a screen persona that sprouted from the stuff of real life. Quoth “The Barefoot Contessa” director Joseph Mankiewicz: “Bogart didn’t walk around with a chip in his shoulder, he carried it in his hand.” And yet, even that insight reflects how Bogart’s filmography still feels like the most lucid window we have into who he was at heart, and “Life Comes in Flashes” is never more revealing as a documentary than when it lets its many film clips do the talking.
Grade: C+
“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is now playing in select theaters.
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