The Protagonist

A documentary
by Jessica Yu

One of the great pointless documentaries of the year, this thing is, for want of a better word, a complete fraud. What Academy Award winner Jessica Yu wants to do is shoehorn four completely disparate and unconnected stories together into a pattern that is going to explain the current world situation. However, it does NOT.

We have a homosexual (Mark Pierpont), who becomes an “ex-gay” evangelist; a German radical (Hans-Joachim Klein) orchestrates acts of terrorism; a troubled young man (Joe Loya) takes to robbing banks; and a scrawny teen (Mark Salzman) learns to master martial arts. They are the same and they are different. They are the same as they are all MEN. Some of them decide that what they are doing is not as good as they thought. Others are thrown in jail and learn that way. Still others go on to other teachers and thus continue with their passion.

The film is about extremism and how it starts, however, extremism is only in perhaps one of the stories, Klein's. Loya's and Salzman's stories has nothing to do with extremism at all, and while Pierpont was a man of great faith who's fall makes him wind up as a fool doing drag shows, it really doesn't have anything to do with the thesis of the film either.

This is simply an attack on faith, an attack on passion, and while blowing stuff up and robbing banks are definitely BAD things to do, Loya and Klein's stories are completely opaque. The puppets don't actually help to make things any clearer, although they're more fun to watch than the talking heads. It seems that Yu had an idea in her head, realized that all the work she was doing would lead nowhere, and went ahead anyway as if the project was finished it might make some of her backers' money back.

For this, they should take her Oscar® back.

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