Filmmaker Jessica Yu was commissioned to make a documentary about Euripides, which would seem a rather arcane topic, and not an easy one to make interesting to contemporary audiences. Her approach in Protagonist is to illustrate the ways in which Euripides' themes -- the dangers of obsession and over-certainty -- continue to play out in modern lives.
Four men tell their stories, and the outline of each is similar: A man finds a way to deal with the frustration and challenges of daily life; at first, his new life seems ideal. Eventually, though, he realizes that he has thrown himself so deeply into his obsession that he's ignored the ways in which it is horribly wrong, which has made him someone he never wanted to be.
In an attempt to recreate the rush he felt when he finally stood up to his abusive father, Joe Loya turned to bank robbery. Mark Pierpont knew he was gay at an early age, and attempted to bury those feelings in religion, becoming a prominent "ex-gay" evangelist preacher. Hans-Joachim Klein's involvement in Germany's radical student political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s led him into terrorism. And high-school outcast Mark Salzman thought he'd finally found a home at a local martial arts school, until he realized that the instructor was a drunken sadist. (If Salzman's story sounds somewhat less compelling and dramatic than the others, it is; Salzman makes up for it by being the best storyteller of the four. He also happens to be Jessica Yu's husband.)
The four stories are divided into chapters, each headed by a key phrase from the dramatic structure of Euripides -- Crisis, Turning Point, Catharsis, Fever -- and introduced by an excerpt from his plays, performed (in ancient Greek, no less) by wooden-rod puppets; the puppets also appear occasionally to act out moments from the men's stories. This structural device does give a certain predictability to the proceedings; if one man starts talking about "the day everything changed," you can be pretty sure that the other three will follow. Despite that element of predictability, though, the parallel storytelling works quite well, and the four stories are compelling even when there's not much suspense about the outcome.
I was reminded somewhat of Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, another documentary in which we are invited to draw comparisons and find the connections among the lives of four men. Protagonist isn't as complex or sophisticated a movie, and the connections are a lot more obvious, but it's entertaining, nevertheless, and worth looking for on DVD or cable.
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