"Tell Them Who You Are": In shocking news, Hollywood radical wasn't great dad!
Mark Wexler's cinematic close encounter with his father, the legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, sometimes feels like such an intimate and painful matter that you shouldn't be watching it. This is sometimes an inelegant film, and you have to admire the junior Wexler for his honesty: It seems that the price of making his famous father look bad is making himself look like a petulant dweeb at certain moments along the way. But documentary mavens and aficionados of classic Hollywood should stick with "Tell Them Who You Are." At exactly the point where I was trying to decide which of these guys was more irritating, the film finds an entirely new gear, and coasts toward an emotional, and surprisingly redemptive, finish.

Twice an Oscar winner (for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 1966 and "Bound for Glory" in 1976) and possessor of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Haskell Wexler is one of the most respected cameramen in American film history. He's also a famously irascible and difficult character, who longed to become a famous director in his own right and never quite got the opportunities. (His feature "Medium Cool," shot against the chaotic backdrop of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, is something of an underground classic.) He tells his son at one point in "Tell Them Who You Are" that he never worked on a film he couldn't have directed better than the actual director did.

Wexler senior is also one of Hollywood's most unrepentant radicals, which is likely to engage the sympathies of this movie's art-house audience. Mark Wexler, who is a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker by trade, is far more conservative -- at one point he presents his dad a picture of himself with George H.W. Bush, which seems like gratuitous salt-rubbing. Then again, having Haskell for a dad might turn anybody into a right-winger; for most of the film, he berates his son for his poor camera technique, slipshod methodology and general stupidity. Concerned that the light is hitting the back of his head, he proclaims, "I am the star of your fucking movie!"

Haskell not only drove his wife and son nuts with his egotism and endless lefty monologues, as it turns out, he also cheated on Mark's mom and eventually dumped her. For most of "Tell Them Who You Are" (you have to see the movie to get the title), it isn't clear whether Mark wants to bury the hatchet or humiliate his dad toward the end of his life, when Haskell can no longer find work in Hollywood and is forced to sell off his collection of camera equipment. Such luminaries as George Lucas, Michael Douglas and Paul Newman parade through the picture to pay tribute to Haskell, but their tone is often mixed, at best. (Douglas, for one, fired Haskell from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.")

But the collision of these two pig-headed guys is eventually interrupted, as is customary in families, by the intervention of women. First they visit Mark's mother, ill with Alzheimer's disease, a wrenching scene that alters the entire tone of the movie. Next they visit Jane Fonda, with whom Wexler traveled to Hanoi in 1974 to make the infamous documentary "Introduction to the Enemy." Jane is certainly my go-to gal for emotional succor, and she looks the part here, sitting on her suburban couch in a sweater set and swapping tales about their activist work with Cesar Chavez and the making of "Coming Home." She provides an unlikely coda to a strange, strident and finally fulfilling father-son saga.

"Tell Them Who You Are" opens May 13 in Los Angeles, May 20 in New York, Chicago and Palm Springs, Calif., May 27 in San Francisco, June 3 in Philadelphia and June 10 in Boston, with more cities to follow in July.

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