112 min | PG | December 30, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics
Robert Caro writes enormous biographies of power. Robert Gottlieb edits them, and the two have argued about it for fifty years. Lizzie Gottlieb points a camera at her father and his most stubborn author and finds a love story disguised as a fight over a semicolon.
Robert Caro writes biographies of power and the men who wield it. Robert Gottlieb edits them. The two have worked together since the 1970s, on “The Power Broker” and the four published volumes of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary follows them as Caro races to finish the fifth Johnson volume and both men confront the arithmetic of age. The film looks like a portrait of a friendship. It is really about labor, about the years of solitary and invisible work that produce a sentence that reads as inevitable.
Caro appears as a man who treats research as a moral duty. He moved to the Texas Hill Country to understand Johnson, and he reads every document until the page gives something up. He still drafts in longhand and types his final pages on a Smith-Corona. Gottlieb appears as his opposite, fast where Caro is slow and caustic where Caro is earnest. The two have fought for decades over semicolons, and the film treats the dispute as the comedy it is. Ethan Hawke, Conan O’Brien, Bill Clinton, David Remnick, and Colm Tóibín appear as readers and explain what the books did to them.
Lizzie Gottlieb directs, and she is the editor’s daughter, which buys her access and costs her distance. No writer takes a credit, because the structure carries the argument. The two men refuse to let the camera watch them edit, and the film builds toward the moment they relent. Gottlieb cuts between separate interviews so the men seem to argue across the frame even when they sit in different rooms. The camera lingers on the physical evidence of the work. Typed pages crowded with penciled marks, the corkboard outline of a Johnson volume, the legal pads filled in longhand.
The closeness gives the film its warmth and its limit. Lizzie Gottlieb loves these men, and the affection sands down any edge the story might have carried. What survives is a quiet argument for patience. Caro and Gottlieb spend their lives on a scale the culture around them has stopped rewarding. The film makes the case that the slow and unglamorous labor is the whole point, and it makes that case by example. It moves at the speed of two men who refuse to be hurried.