Now streaming on Netflix, Errol Morris’s Wormwood might have made a superb two-hour feature—but as it stands, the series (which unfolds in six parts) runs twice that length. It’s still an engaging and sometimes enthralling work, raising provocative questions about CIA conspiracies and how individuals reconcile with national history. Yet it’s also repetitive and padded out, stuffed with stylistic flourishes that add little to the material. Wormwood continues Morris’s investigation into dark corners of modern American history, making it of a piece with The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and The Unknown Known. It also breaks new ground for the acclaimed documentary filmmaker: Rather than staging brief, silent reenactments of events discussed by his interviewees (as he usually does), here Morris (working with writers Kieran Fitzgerald, Steven Hathaway, and Molly Rokosz) incorporates relatively lengthy dramatic episodes with actors and dialogue. These dramatic passages, though fitfully interesting, ultimately sink Wormwood, adding an unnecessary layer of distractions to an already knotty tale.
I was bothered by some of Morris’s other aesthetic decisions as well. The excerpts from Olivier’s Hamlet are used gracelessly, and close-ups of text (from newspapers, government reports, and other firsthand sources) feel recycled from Morris’s other films. But the most egregiously distracting element is the director’s use of split screens. Throughout Wormwood Morris employs them during interviews, showing two, four, or six minishots of the same person talking. Whereas other filmmakers have used split screens to convey a multitude of perspectives, Morris just presents multiple versions of the same one, cluttering the frames to suggest a moral complexity that isn’t necessarily there. It’s a pointless flourish, though it’s consistent with the pointless narrative repetitions that drag Wormwood out to four hours.
