Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb documentary review: slow journalism

Some readers can’t wait for George R.R. Martin’s sixth Game of Thrones novel. Others eagerly await Vol 5 of celebrated journalist Robert Caro’s *checks notes* originally-gonna-be-three-volume biography of former US president Lyndon B. Johnson.† Among the latter: Robert Gottlieb, Caro’s equally celebrated editor. The sprightly Gottlieb here looks much younger than his 90 years, but he knows that this collaboration will be their last… if the 87-year-old Caro will ever finish the damn manuscript.

Documentarian Lizzie Gottlieb takes us on an exploration of a working partnership of half a century that is perhaps more intimate than another filmmaker might have achieved — she is the editor’s daughter, after all. But the crisp, congenial charms of Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb overlay a clear-eyed, unsentimental elegy for an era in journalism and publishing that even dedicated culture-watchers may not have realized has all but disappeared.

Gottlieb — here deemed “the most important American editor and publisher of the postwar period” — in many ways helped create modern publishing: the sequence of him wandering New York’s famous Strand bookstore pointing out all the then unknown, now iconic authors he took a chance on and all the groundbreaking books he’s edited and published is astonishing. Caro is an immensely influential voice among wonks and politics geeks — “he reminds us how the world is really build and how power changes our lives” — and evinces an incredible dedication to and detail in his work, immersing himself in years-long bouts of research that result in writing considered deeply empathetic and profoundly insightful.

Separately and together, both men are defined by a kind of obsessiveness, which is of course a timeless quality. What is already gone, however, and lingers with these two only because their great project isn’t yet done, is a cultural environment that allows them the luxury of time — long stretches of slow time — for carefully contemplated and constructed writing. That their LBJ opus could literally be decades in the making, and that a significant readership could still be on tenterhooks anticipating the final chapter in a massive political biography, feels like a scenario that will never, could never happen again. (I’d love to be wrong about this…)

There may not be many writers left who use typewriters and carbon paper(!), as Caro does, but plenty here is perennial for grammar geeks and word nerds, and will delight those of us who dork out that way: “a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about,” Gottlieb jokes in a kidding-not-kidding way. (He is correct. Whomst else among you will squeal, as I did, when a purple editing pencil makes an appearance?) And, indeed, director Gottlieb handles these two towering figures, grand shapers of public intellect over the past century, not as objects of worship but as just a couple of grammar geeks and word nerds themselves. There’s even something cheeky, rather than submissively reverent, as could have happened, in L. Gottlieb’s decision to have Ethan Hawke (Tesla, Juliet, Naked) read on camera from Caro’s books.

Caro is definitely having a moment: his legendary book The Power Broker, about controversial New York City urban planner Robert Moses, seemed to jumped out of the bookshelves of thinkers punditing on TV from home during the coronavirus pandemic, as director Gottlieb amusingly depicts. (This may well have partially inspired playwright David Hare, whose brand-new play Straight Line Crazy, starring Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses, just finished its off-Broadway run after a debut at London’s National Theatre earlier this year.) It’s all a beautiful coincidence for Gottlieb the younger’s film, however — Turn Every Page has itself been five years in the making. Perhaps extremely slow-burn public intellectualism isn’t quite dead yet.

†there may be some overlap between the two camps

more films like this:
• Wonder Boys [Prime US | Apple TV | BBC iPlayer]
• Spotlight [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | HBO Max US | Netflix UK]