A Letter to True | Review

Weber provides viewer’s with a dog-lover’s fest with a conscious.

After the events of 9/11, many American filmmakers felt an urgency to create works with anti-war, anti-propaganda messages. Instead of throwing him a biscuit or making him fetch a ball, photographer Bruce Weber pulls out the pad and paper and then the camera and visually recites a letter to one of his beloved pups. Zeitgeist’s A Letter to True is perhaps not the solution for world-piece, but it certainly brings justice to those who think that man’s best friend comes in the form of golden retrievers.

Formed as a diary-patterned documentary and narrated by Marianne Faithfull, Julie Christie and Weber himself, this merges a passion for dogs with plenty other personal items and obsessions – basically the things that one person would miss the most if the H-bomb would have disseminated a larger surface of the Big Apple. Among the personal experience items thrown into the large vat of alphabet soup are archival World War II footage with a hillbilly’s interpretation of a fun time, vintage old home movies from the 50’s with romanticized slow-motion shots of a fleet of dogs, and there is even place for a little bit of Elizabeth Taylor, a nice selection of jazzy scores and everything and anything else Americana. All of these items fail to gel together.

Much in the style of the videos to the songs of Pet Shop Boy’s Domino Dancing or Chris Issaks’ Wicked Game and you’ve pretty much got the texture and the flavor for one portion of this visual diary – and while the orange-yellowish stars of the film, who go by one name only, certainly look like angels with paws instead of wings – it hardly justifies itself as a full out anti-war message or commentary. However, aesthetically speaking, the sublimely beautiful shots do more for animal photography than those stupid favorite pet calendars available in book stores.

While anything under a lyrical black and white cinematographic scope always is appreciated, you’ve got to be a real dog lover to appreciate this film. A Letter to True is built as an ode of one man’s life and favorite things to do journal – and while it may like a very personal experience – it truly remains a perplexing piece which would have been better-suited as a PBS documentary feature than a trip to the Angelika.

Rating 1.5 stars