Netflix
Bob Balaban in a scene from Errol Morris’ Wormwood.
In both form and content, Oscar-winner Errol Morris’s four-hour-plus Wormwood is arguably not only the best picture of 2017 but one of the greatest films of all time, a timeless work of courage and imagination.
Wormwood is about the perplexing 1953 death of Army scientist Frank Olson, who plunged thirteen floors from a Manhattan hotel to the sidewalk. The circumstances of this death struck his son Eric, one of Frank’s three children, as extremely strange, and he devoted his life to solving this mystery, originally written off as an accident or suicide.
About twenty years into Eric’s pursuit of the truth, the Rockefeller Commission unearthed Central Intelligence Agency wrongdoing, and President Gerald Ford personally apologized to the Olson family at the White House. The bacteriologist’s death was tied to early CIA experimentation with LSD, as part of the spy agency’s MK-ULTRA program.
A congressional “settlement” with the Olsons avoided an independent court case that may have brought more information to light.
Eric remained steadfast in his quest to find out what really happened to his father. He slowly pieced together pieces of the puzzle.
Wormwood blends nonfiction and fiction in a way that expands the movie medium as it relentlessly, boldly strives to tell the truth.
Frank Olson conducted bio-war experiments for the Pentagon during a time when the “Red Chinese” and North Koreans, as well as captured American POWs, claimed the United States carried out germ warfare during the Korean War. Wormwood suggests Olson was a Robert Oppenheimer-like dissident scientist liquidated for opposing the military’s top secret biological war programs and their deployment in Korea.
The film notes that the ruse of deaths due to falling from heights is literally straight out of the CIA’s manual. Olson’s purported “execution” took place when the agency turned to covert actions, such as the coups that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. According to Wormwood, one of Olson’s close associates, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, was linked to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and plots to kill Castro.
Morris—who won a Best Documentary Academy Award for 2003’s Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara—tells this complex tale in an extremely creative way. From home movies to Hamlet to archival footage to newsreels to original interviews shot by Morris to extensive reenactments performed by actors Peter Sarsgaard, Bob Balaban, Michael Chernus, and Tim Blake Nelson, Morris weaves together the different cinematic strands into something quite new.
Netflix
A scene from Errol Morris’ Wormwood.
Morris movingly incorporates numerous scenes from Laurence Olivier’s 1948 version of Hamlet, as Eric Olson’s lifelong crusade for justice for his dad is likened to the predicament of the Prince of Denmark, charged by his father’s ghost with avenging his “murder most foul.” Wormwood is a bitter plant mentioned in the Bible and by Hamlet in the play.
Wormwood blends nonfiction and fiction in a way that expands the movie medium as it relentlessly, boldly strives to tell the truth. The film culminates with Morris interviewing Seymour Hersh, one of America’s greatest investigative reporters, famed for exposing the My Lai massacre.
Among the real-life figures we encounter via vintage clips are former CIA Directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and William Colby, who was involved in the CIA’s murderous Phoenix Program in Vietnam and, like Olson, died mysteriously. Those Ford White House apparatchiks, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (the subject of Morris’s 2013 documentary, The Unknown Known), are also shown along the way for their roles in the Olson saga. Liberal icons such as Senator Teddy Kennedy and Congresswoman Bella Abzug also make guest appearances.
Thirty years ago, Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line helped exonerate a man facing a death sentence after he was wrongfully convicted of murder. With Wormwood, the sixty-nine-year-old Morris returns to expose another case of rank injustice.
On December 15 Wormwood will simultaneously be released in theaters as a single marathon-length movie that, like Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, has an intermission; and on Netflix as a six-part mini-series.
Wormwood recalls D.W. Griffith’s 1916 colossal classic Intolerance, which told the story of man’s inhumanity to man throughout history with four different stories skillfully interwoven through virtuoso parallel editing. Morris uses a similar, highly innovative hybrid film form for his biting critique of America’s spy agency and anti-communist Cold War hysteria—and the son who said “no.”
In the process, Errol Morris may not only be solving another crime but inventing a new kind of motion picture. Bravo, maestro Morris!
The third edition of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, co-authored by L.A.-based reviewer/film historian Ed Rampell, drops in March 2018.