Errol Morris’ ‘Mr. Death’ Offers Documentary In Unique Style

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris first attracted the attention of film fans with “Gates of Heaven,” his 1978 study of pet cemeteries.

Roger Ebert still lists “Gates of Heaven” as one of his all-time favorite movies.

Ten years later, Morris released the film that cemented his reputation. “The Thin Blue Line” is an intriguing study of a murder case in Texas that questioned the very notion of Texas justice. Blatantly ignored by the Academy, like all of Morris’ work, “The Thin Blue Line” changed the way that many of us began to look at documentaries.

Instead of the classic Barbara Kopple-type film (“Harlan County, USA,” “American Dream”), which tells stories by blending real-life scenes with interviews (often tying things together with voice-overs), Morris makes films that are as much fun to watch as they are illuminating about the topic he is studying.

“The Thin Blue Line” uses creative techniques in much the same way that followers of the New Journalism (Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson and others) employed fictional techniques to give their writing more of an edge. Among other things, Morris uses staged dramatic representations of real-life events as seen though the eyes of various witnesses — representations that often conflict with one another. Through this manner, he hoped to arrive at a truth that standard documentary filmmaking (and the Texas legal system itself) had missed.

As Ebert himself has written, “Morris is much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves.” Whatever the truth, a man being held on death row was ultimately released.

Morris’ most recent film, which comes out on video this week, is similar in technique though far different in topic. “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leutcher Jr.” tells the story of a man with a singular skill — an adeptness for refining various means for human execution — whose hubris ultimately ruins him.

Though quite capable of devising an effective way to kill someone through lethal injection, Leutcher is less capable of knowing when he was being used. Hired by a Holocaust revisionist, he ends up claiming that the infamous Auschwitz was never a death camp.

Morris shows that Leutcher based his conclusions on flawed evidence, and he documents how Leutcher quickly lost any credibility — as well as the prison work that had supported him. But he doesn’t make him out to be evil, only as flawed as his evidence.

In fact, Morris — as he admitted at the Sundance Film Festival — can’t avoid the fact that he likes Leutcher.

The Academy probably won’t like that, either.

The DVD revolution

Anyone who loves knowing how movies are made should enjoy the two-disc special-edition DVD version of David Fincher’s movie “Fight Club” — even if you didn’t particularly like the movie itself.

The first disc features the movie itself (in widescreen format) plus four audio commentaries: one by director Fincher and cast members Brad Pitt and Edward Norton; one by Fincher alone; one by novelist Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter Jim Uhls, and one by the movie’s design crew.

The second is a virtual filmmaker’s workshop, focusing on such behind-the-scenes materials as a making-of segment, a look at special-effects preparation, location shooting, alternative scenes, theatrical trailers and more.

The DVD special edition of “Fight Club” can be ordered online for as little as $20.99 through Reel.com and Amazon.com.

The week’s other major release on video and/or DVD:

Girl, Interrupted

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By adapting Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the same name, writer-director James Mangold (“Cop Land”) tries to do a little too much at once. He tries to tell the story of our protagonist Susanna (played by executive producer Winona Ryder). He tries to capture the feel of a mental institution. He tries to capture the kinds of complex emotions that would drive a young woman to wash down a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of tequila. And he tries to do all of this against the backdrop of 1967, a time when the very idea of normalcy — much less the roles that any concept of normalcy would dictate — was itself coming under attack.

Mangold only partially succeeds, and he does so mostly through the spirited performances of Ryder and Angelina Jolie (which, surprisingly, won her a Best Supporting Actress award). What helps are the suitably muted — and moving — supporting roles played by the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, Jeffrey Tambor and Vanessa Redgrave. Mangold resorts too much to Hollywood formula, but he gets the rest of it right. (VHS/DVD). Rated R.