Tell Them Who You Are

Near the beginning of the movie, the younger Wexler admits that the film is his attempt to get closer to his father. This sense of personal mission helps make Tell Them Who You Are the richest documentary of its kind since Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb."

What Mark does, better perhaps than either he or his father realizes, is to capture some aspects of a lifelong rivalry that involves love but not much contentment.

The elder Wexler keeps insisting that he won't sign a release for the film unless he approves of the finished product, so he must have been pleased with its brutally honest assessment of him as a gifted filmmaker who never realized his true potential.

Beneath its exploration of fatherly distance, this is really a portrait of why cranks make better artists than earnest nice guys.

Busting with clips from films Haskell Wexler shot and directed, the doc is a rare thing: an ingenuous portrait of a thoroughly Four-Square Artist, Assembled With Love And Rockets Inside A Family's Spite-Tainted Gates.

He has had a notable career, and I wish there had been more specifics about it in the film.

Tell Them Who You Are is indulgent by design, and the elder Wexler may be right about his son's aesthetic failings.