Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer

For younger generations, Werner Herzog has become their Peter Lorre. They might not know his bold early films like Fitzcarraldo, but they love his accent, enjoy seeing him play the villain in the Mandalorian and Jack Reacher franchises, and dig seeing him play himself on The Simpsons. Just wait till they hear about how he ate his shoe. For a fuller picture, Thomas von Steinaecker takes stock of Herzog’s entire career in the documentary profile, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, which releases Tuesday on VOD.

Radical Dreamer starts with Herzog’s difficult wartime childhood in Germany and proceeds in An orderly manner to his current unlikely celebrity salad days in America. He generally just follows Herzog as he retraces the major events of his life, waiting for the filmmaker to say something eccentric. Fortunately, he frequently obliges. Herzog was too young to have understood WWII at the time, but he was part of the post-War generation that helped decide what German culture would look like in the 1960s.

Even today, Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are probably the films that define Herzog as a narrative filmmaker. They were extreme in just about every way. The production experiences were partly like performance art and partly like the Labors of Hercules. It is amazing they were complete without (greater) tragedy. Fitzcarraldo became especially celebrated/notorious thanks to Les Blank’s “making of” documentary, The Burden of Dreams.

Radical Dreamer reminds viewers of what life was like for cineastes before VCRS, when fans used to line-up around the block for screenings of Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo, because they did not know when they would ever get another chance to see them. A lot has changed since then. Those same fans would probably be shocked by the notion of Carl Weathers appearing in a documentary about Herzog, but here he is, discussing his Mandalorian co-star.

When it comes to talking heads, von Steinaecker seems to have chosen them according to their celebrity value, rather than the reputation of the work they appeared in. For instance, both Nicole Kidman and Robbert Pattison from Herzog’s much-maligned Queen of the Desert discuss their pleasant memories of the director. However, Christian Bale represents one of Herzog’s narrative high-points, Rescue Dawn, explaining how one scene nearly killed him.

Beyond Bale, there is occasionally some mild second-guessing of Herzog’s methods and choices, most notably the “insane penguin” sequence in Encounters at the End of the World, but mostly Radical Dreamer is a fan-friendly survey of his life and films. Both have been quite eventful, so the doc breezes along nicely. Recommended for fans of Herzog and the German film scene he came out of (also including Wim Wenders and Volker Schlondorff, who duly offer their commentary), Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer releases Tuesday (12/5) on digital.