Starring Jerry as Himself

When you find something that you love, you tend to given in to the temptation to want to become a connoisseur.  That’s kind of how I feel about documentaries, possibly my favorite genre.  I could watch an entire marathon of documentaries and, in fact, at this year’s Sidewalk Film Festival, I gave an entire day to nothing BUT documentaries.  I was in Heaven.  And yet, there are rules.  The long-standing accepted convention of the genre is that you have to say within the Verite borders; no recreations, no re-enactments; just stick with the facts. 

That’s what makes Starring Jerry as Himself something of a challenge.  This is a very troubling story told by an unreliable narrator the recreates the action in a way that, if you came in cold, you’d think was a fictional drama.  And yet, it works to the effect that it is trying to achieve, even if we question how it really happened.

The story is this: Jerry Liu is a Taiwanese immigrant to worked all his life and raised his three sons and had one late-life goal, to move to America and retire there.  However, a bizarre set of circumstances threatened his dream.  He began receiving phone calls from a Chinese police officer telling him that he is being recruited to help solve an international money laundering scam that he is apparently involved in.  He is told that in order to clear his name, he has to follow orders, gather information and help the police catch the real culprit.

If you smell a scam in that, then you’re really not far off, but I’ll leave it to you to find out for yourself.  There is something sinister going on here but the larger point is that question how much of the story is real and how much of it came from what Jerry actually remembers.  Is he a reliable witness?  Did it really happen?

One of the movie’s goals is to break down the conventions of the genre, and have the viewer question what really happened.  The ending is bittersweet, but as we look back over the course of the film, we ask ourselves how much of it we really believe.  Are we ourselves being scammed?