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Documentaries, no matter how compelling, are often
like vegetables on your dinner plate. Though usually educational
and informative, and like those greens, full of ingredients
that are good for you and beneficial to absorb, they're
not likely to nearly compare to the enjoyment of followup
dessert. Which makes a features film like The Reflecting
Pool, a nuts and bolts documentary dressed up in all the
engrossing finery of a thriller, an inventive and captivating
idea.***
Writer/director Jarek Kupsc, a Polish immigrant to
the US, stars in The Reflecting Pool as Alex, a New York
City based journalist born in the Soviet Union, who feels
he made a wise choice to live here instead, where he can
enjoy a career in a free press. That is, until the editor
at his magazine (Lisa Black) informs him that there's a
hostile corporate takeover in the works and their days are
numbered, but she wants to go out in a blaze of glory with
a hot story.***
That opportunity arrives with a mysterious videotape
offering evidence that 9/11 may have been a government conspiracy
rather than a foreign attack, and his editor insists that
he go for it. The sender turns out to be Peter (Joseph Culp),
a man who lost his young daughter in one of the planes that
hit the Twin Towers. And Peter's life is consumed, for reasons
yet to be revealed, with discovering an alternative truth
about what really happened on 9/11.***
Alex, who is more of a careerist than an avid muckraker,
accepts the assignment with an initial lack of enthusiasm.
But he is soon as obsessed with following unconventional
leads as Peter. 9/11, a tragedy, failure of response, coincidence,
conspiracy, coverup, or insurance fraud? All these potential
scenarios run rampant in The Reflecting Pool, as frantic
talking heads alternately mouth off as well as roll.***
Prokop takes a chance as a filmmaker in combining all
the mountains of information of a documentary with the suspense
and passion of a feature film, and he mostly pulls it off.
There are rough spots where the characters seem just about
to cave in under the weight of all the details they're delivering
to the audience in the guise of dialogue. And Alex's own
back story is a little sketchy when not naive, as a supposed
prominent and learned journalist whose grasp of the past,
whether of the Soviet Union or the US, appears to have been
gleaned from history for dummies.***
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