By Dennis Harvey

THE INCREASINGLY PERVASIVE desire to live one's life in public has certainly not raised people's discernment level regarding the image they present. Of course, some rare folks just walk in beauty, or scatter glimmering pearls of wit or warmth whither they roam. But given the fact that nearly each and every Joe Blow gets the unflattering 15 minutes they think they deserve – on sideshow-like chat shows, wholly surreal "reality" series, Webcasts, and on down – wouldn't you figure it'd become less desirable to make an idiot of oneself? That all these examples would be taken as cautionary?

Apparently not. This trend has lately been spilling over into the hitherto mostly sober realm of serious documentary. The genre is no stranger to profiling flawed, heinous, even evil people, albeit usually without their full consent, and often when they are already dead. How strange, then, that a recent run of interesting docs has entirely focused on obnoxious personalities who actually encouraged the filmmakers (at least until remorse set in). There was the example of Overnight, in which alleged multitalent Troy Duffy let friends record his burning tantrums and sneerings en route to creating the crap Tarantino rip-off Boondock Saints. Then there's the curious case of Werner Herzog's grizzly man (from the film of the same name), who videotaped for posterity the ego-mad self that practically ensured his fate as bear dinner.

It could be argued that those two particular world-class narcissists compounded error by ultimately offering no redemptive labor, no lasting achievement worth all the annoyance – nothing beyond the train-wreck fascination of their unwisely preserved delusions. That's hardly the case with Haskell Wexler, subject of his son Mark's new Tell Them Who You Are. The elder Wexler is one of the great cinematographers of the past 40 years, a major contributor to The Loved One, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, American Graffiti, Coming Home, Days of Heaven, and more. He's also directed a couple of good documentary-style fiction features (Medium Cool, Latino) and several actual documentaries reflecting a degree of leftist political commitment no one could dismiss as mere "Hollywood liberalism."

On the other hand, Wexler is (or in some cases was, given that he's now in his 80s) a product of familial wealth and privilege ungrateful enough to have once helped organize a strike against his own father's factory; a longtime womanizer now on his third marriage (to a much younger woman, of course); a massive egotist who says with a shrug, "I don't think there's a movie I've been on that I wasn't sure I could direct better." He got fired from Coppola's The Conversation and Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest for making the shoot impossible, yet he's still convinced he only lost the latter job because the FBI pressured the studio. (He'd recently shot interviews with fugitive Weather Underground members.)

Mark Wexler has his own lower-profile but notable career as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker – but, needless to say, the day he'll get any respect as such from his dad is that fabled day when there's snowboarding in Hades. The painfully fascinating Tell Them Who You Are does not provide the behind-the-scenes movie history anecdotes you (and Wexler Jr.) might have hoped for; Haskell evidently saves those for the DVD-reissue audio commentaries he now gets paid for. What it has instead is an illustrated parental horror story told with the cooperation (more or less) of the party at fault.

"Don't direct me!" Wexler barks at his hapless offspring, though "I, the star of your fucking movie" sure doesn't shrink from directing the director. Thinking himself off mic, Dad clucks to a friend that "[Mark's] whole point in life is to say he's more important than me," a whopping instance of pot-kettle-black. A few minutes later he says, "If I knew what I know now, you wouldn't have turned into such a mess," which seems intended humorously but doesn't feel like it one bit.

Even the subject's admirable politics are soured by his preachiness, snobbery, and self-righteousness; he's as unwilling to hear divergent opinions as the fundamentalist neocons he deplores. To be fair, the director's own political leanings – a conservative backlash against Pop's – could have been spelled out more clearly. But Tell Them Who You Are is otherwise confessional in all the right ways, as both sides make earnest (if erratic) attempts at peacemaking that are pretty well doomed. At the end there's tenderness behind the camera and a crack in the emotional brick wall when Haskell breaks into rare tears, moved by an old cohort's disappearance deep into Alzheimer's. But maybe it's just his own encroaching mortality he weeps for.

"Intimacy was not their [generation's] gift," Jane Fonda tactfully notes here; she and Michael Douglas discuss how Wexler's ruthlessly "critical" nature reminded them of their own famous, impossible-to-please fathers. Perhaps they did love their children but didn't know how to show it.

Or perhaps not. Ever wonder what it would be like to hit someone in the head with one of those big fuzzy booms? I spent these 95 minutes wondering. Under certain circumstances, it could probably be very, very satisfying.

'Tell Them Who You Are' opens Fri/27, Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness, S.F. (415) 267-4893. See Movie Clock for show times.