Alice Neel

The finely crafted Alice Neel is at once tribute, investigative journalism and messy family drama.

Andrew Neel's fascinating but troubling documentary about his famous grandmother is more than a mere biography of an important 20th-century artist: It's also an intimate portrait of a family member that questions whether or not "great artist" and "good parent" can ever be combined in the same person.

Much like Neel's portraits, the film is marked by audacious understatement, neither whitewashing nor sensationalizing the artist's sterling achievements and messy personal life.

It achieves the documentary format’s basic goal of illuminating history while also demonstrating, through filmmaking choices, how an artist’s style reveals his or her personality.

For all the juicy storytelling, Alice Neel remains, in this film, a cipher: brash, grandmotherly, and beyond understanding.

Comes across as a cautionary tale.

Neel is a compelling subject, but she's more alive in one of her paintings than in all of the voluminous video footage her grandson thrusts upon us.