Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control

From his 1978 debut, Gates of Heaven much-admired film-maker Errol Morris has been known for his distinctively off-beat, tendentious documentaries. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is no exception.  But what it is tending towards is less certain.

Morris takes four men with unusual occupations and gets them talking about their respective vocations. There's Dave Hoover, a lion tamer; George Mendonça, a topiary gardener; Ray Mendez, a specialist in the little-known world of the hairless mole rat; and Rodney Brooks, a robotics designer. Morris intercuts their to-camera reflections with a variety of illustrative footage.

In a move that is purposively at the other end of the spectrum to his focused, through-going investigation of the story of a wrongly convicted murderer in The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris not only has no apparent reason for bringing together these men, as opposed to any other combination of odd-balls, or perhaps, given that in the final analysis we are all strange, just any four people.

Indeed, so disparate are the four that Morris seems to be challenging us to make some kind of connection between them. One would hope it’s more than to laugh at them and their life’s work, which although (or because) the four individuals take themselves very seriously, are variously obsessively nerdy (the robot builder), pathetically passé (the circus lion tamer), slightly odd (the mole rat expert) and terminally inconsequential (the topiarist) and their reflections on them, banal. As the film goes on Morris mixes up the audio from one story with the visual from another although without giving form to any discernible thesis other than, one might say, to observe the weird things that people choose to do with their time on earth. 

 

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