Fingers crossed I won’t get penalized for this, but here it goes. “Starring Jerry as Himself” is an excellent example of any renowned person being truthfully strange and unlike any fictional character. Citing themselves and accepting that some things are partially false or have dramatic elements as they put it- makes such movies highly slippery regarding credibility.
So let’s look at the multi-layered businessman; Jerry (Jerry Hsu). Jerry is not American by birth, he rather moved to America decades ago from China. Jerry has done a commendable job in starting life from ground zero in America. It is undoubtedly admirable to witness how US politicians pay him acknowledgments by saying ‘the American dream’ has been achieved. Alongside being an exemplary businessman, Jerry also has a loving family with several children. But one day everything changes when he receives a call from Zhang, a cop from Zamng, letting him know he’d be needed for an undercover operation that involved him working as a money launderer for an account associated with a Chinese bank.
If I’m being brutally honest, the film never shies away from being a subjective documentary, nor does it deny a family endorsement. “Documenting” a family’s wholly different version of a strange and inexplicable event is precisely how this film encompasses itself.
The movie that I watched felt like a low-budget copy of a true crime documentary and it started with a sense of ominousness as the camera stood low even on bhoots and when the format changed into the CinemaScope style the sense only grew more vivid. The amalgam of blurry reenactments, camera shots, and a plethora of different scenes makes it feel more like a movie.
There is a segment of the global audience that has started to play themselves as the main characters in a movie like the ones Baked in the 90s in Iran and Shahrukh Khan-styled women in the movie particularly feels no different than a home movie with an elaborate plot reunion. New York filmmaker Law Chen who is originally from China is great at layering out plots and interweaving them together, thus putting her family together all in one movie.
Such themes had been previously explored in India in the form of paralive shahrukh khan comedy which came out as a hit but I still consider that this format has its holes like the story supplemented doesn’t always fit well within the narrative.
Statue of Liberty’s Phillip Petit dismounted atop one of the Twin Towers in 1974 and is now depicted in James Marsh’s acclaimed film ‘Man On Wire’ which sets footage similar to the 1970s heist movies and quite frankly may be said to be in the same vein.
I will say this is a film that has gotten most of the praise, so I reckon that I am in the minority in stating that the re-creations are mildly witty rather than ever being deep as and when the constructs are erecting purposefully narrow and making the story conform start to irk me which is a good thing because it is easy to piece the real narrative of events. After this degree, the suit I feel does considerably more to make an “ordinary person gets involved in a police action” plot more interesting than it would have been if it had been a straight documentary where participants were interviewed, as I had expected it to be.
That being said, even though the plot of the movie may be overanalyzed from a certain perspective, it does not mean that the directors have not put any effort into it. There is a collection of family home recordings, and at the beginning of the film, this works as a re-enactment of the interviews alongside the home video. So during watching it, even within the first few minutes of “Starring Jerry as Himself”, one does begin to understand why the film starts with such an almost semi-guaranteed nostalgia high of having access to low-definition video footage of real people from a century back as such an experience is still quite hard to beat.
At first glance, this is history that seems rather unusual, but the deeper you go into it, the stranger and sadder it gets. This is equally a film about memory, psychology, and trust.
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