One sticky August afternoon, while bottoming out the six-foot hole that some hulking, yellow backhoe left unfinished, I decided that the only thing less inspiring than a film's pretense of objective truth was the banality of a pay-per-letter gravestone epitaph. You see, those of us who were given the degradation of shoveling out the remains of a grave site responded in kind by working at a barely perceptible pace, smoking lots of generic cigarettes and contemplating life's important topics (whiskey-dick, filmmaking, etc.) And so it was that I squatted below grade in the exhaust of a GPC, thinking that a decent documentary absolutely must elicit the question: “Is this real?”
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's The Young and the Dead never gives a straight answer. In this inverted mockumentary of pretty young go-getters taking on the unlikely business of running a cemetery, real people deliver insights about death and memory so insipid they must be scripted. Berman and Pulcini's camera cuts quickly from victim to victim, capturing ridiculous gems like: “If you have a crappy font on [your headstone], I think it would reflect on your attention to detail.” Even Tyler Cassity, cast as the earnest entrepreneur, can't escape the ruthless editing when he says in all seriousness, “as a dead person, I would like people to be laughing.”
As entertaining as the “line 'em up and knock 'em down” style can be, The Young and the Dead is most successful when it plays with the tension between mocking and empathy. Slipped into the relentless parade of star-struck lunacy are moments of genuine mourning, filled with that awkwardness of too-public-and-too-private-all-at-once. Unfortunately, these moments are few and far between. Instead quirky incidents and characters crowd the film's predictable trajectory: Hollywood Forever's youthful, executive staff grows personally while breathing new life into the deathcare industry.
Glendale's Forest Lawn is portrayed as the industry's past, reconstructing old world monuments in a cheerfully reconfigured present. In the spirit of Evelyn Waugh's Loved One, the satire based on Forest Lawn, The Young and the Dead mercilessly lampoons Hubert Eaton's “Builder's Creed” and smiling Jesus (which he called an “American Christ.”) Hollywood Forever - with it's 15-minute biographies and boardroom techno-brainstorming sessions - is the future. Or so says Tyler. In spite of his statement that “this century, we haven't used any new technology” in the art of memorialization, the American twentieth century was fundamentally changed by the emergence of embalming as the de facto postmortem process and by the funeral industry it engendered. Jessica Mitford's monumental expose, The American Way of Death, isn't mentioned, even in spirit. Rather, Hollywood Forever's Gang of Six shamelessly push the same old collection of kitschy trinkets and overpriced services (now including a webpage!) on their mostly elderly clientele.
It is to Berman and Pulcini's credit that they approach the phenomenon of the American cemetery without the pedantic aspirations that might have leadened the film; but a little history would have been nice. Tyler's prediction that the hard drive will be the “definitive archive of human memories” is echoed in Jean-Luc Godard's newest film, In Praise of Love, which suggests the question: when memory is displaced from the human to technology, what happens to history?
Instead of dwelling on its place as a moment of memory and part of history, however, The Young and the Dead ups the ante, challenging its own basic premise of reality. What begins as a rather straightforward documentary, with interviews and anecdotes, transforms slowly when Tyler Cassity, not content to be merely the subject, steps out from in front of the camera and becomes part of the documentary's apparatus. Tyler sleuths around in an effort to dig up the dirt on Jules Roth and in one particularly morbid scene, he's a veritable Grim Reaper with a tape recorder, interviewing Rudolph Valentino's sickly memorializer, Bud Testa.
With Hollywood Forever's competent publicity machine complicit in the production of the film, the Object disappears. The Young and the Dead becomes the documentary equivalent of a pencil drawing of graphite. The result is brilliantly self-effacing, a portrayal of Hollywood through the lens of a subculture in as honest a vision as could be expected, but symptomatically empty. None of the characters become more complex or endearing upon reflection like Floyd McClure or the Harbert family in Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven. Death, although constantly referenced, remains virtually untouched amidst the hollow (albeit, constant) laughter.
