THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (Nanette Burstein, Brett Morgen, 2002) R

Reviewed: August 19th, 2002

The Kid Stays In the Picture is a zesty, enormously entertaining, touching, archival pastiche. Many are classifying it as a documentary on Robert Evans, the woman's garment industry maven/pretty boy/actor/playboy/producer/studio head who was a driving force behind the glory of 70s cinema. Evans disagrees, referring to The Kid as a performance piece. I don't think it's either-- here is finally a film that fails to be categorized by any familiar genre label because The Kid Stays In the Picture is unlike anything we've ever seen.

Based on Robert Evans' autobiography of the same name, The Kid is drenched in history. Nearly every element of the film is out of the past (save the brief, current shots of Evans' home); be it clusters of old photographs to arrays of prior magazine/newspaper clippings to a slew of circa 1970s film clips (including some of the films Evans produced, namely Love Story, The Godfather, Harold and Maude, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby). Any talking heads (and there are very, very few) are snippets of Evans being interviewed on long canceled television programs. Over all of these artifacts booms Evans' impossibly gravely voice--he narrates the film by way of reading straight from his autobiography and the brilliance of the movie is it plays as if the filmmakers are constantly trying to keep pace with him, throwing out all the stops to visually inform whatever he's speaking about at the given moment. The ingenuity and variety of techniques they employ is startling-- my favorite has to be depicting conversations by animating photographs of the participants (that might sound kitschy on the page, but it's beautifully executed on the screen). Thus The Kid Stays In the Picture becomes a cross between nostalgia and exotica, an entrancing tour through retro Hollywood coolness and scandal.

I will not go into any details of Evans' roller-coaster life. You deserve to experience them fresh, on your own, sitting in the darkened theater (most over 40 film geeks probably remember the broad outline already). All I'll say is the man's lived a full, peppery 70+ years, jam-packed with succulent morsels and every bit worthy of its committal to film. Evans recounts this history with endearing self-deprecation and a lot of humor.

The Kid Stays In the Picture begins with a quote that essentially says (as if we couldn't figure this out on our own) we are only going to be getting Robert Evans' side of the story. Like any self-respecting movie buff I've read Peter Biskind's amazing resource Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a down n' dirty, exhaustingly researched account of filmmaking in the 1970s. I know there's tons The Kid Stays In the Picture leaves out, yet I was never offended by instances of inaccuracy (and hey, cut the film some slack, it's only 93 minutes not a miniseries). If Evans' overstates his importance a tad, he can be forgiven in how candidly the film deals with his cocaine induced downfall.

The Kid Stays In the Picture is an affecting glimpse inside a gated-off world, and as such, one of the best films of the year.

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