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Oh My God... She’s An Old Maid! | In It’s a Wonderful Life, Donna Reed faces a horrible alternate-reality fate as a spinster, one of many stereotypes cited in The Hollywood Librarian.
How much of that are you prepared to believe? Your answer is directly proportional to how much you will enjoy Seidl’s film, which has questionable ethics at best, and at worst is the sloppiest and most unfocused documentary I have ever seen.
The film’s subtitle is A Look at Librarians Through Film, although that’s largely a smokescreen (unless you count the fact that you’re literally watching interviews with librarians as projected from reels of film). Yes, there are several clip montages drawing widely from the history of cinema, but there’s no attempt to draw any larger conclusions; the best Seidl can come up with is—spoiler alert—librarians are often shown as frumpy.
Once you realize the film has no intention of following its stated mission, the real identity crisis begins. Is The Hollywood Librarian about the day-to-day operations of a small-town library? Is it a manifesto arguing in defence of literacy in a video-saturated culture? Is it about Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon who funded more than 2,500 public libraries worldwide? Each of these topics enjoys a brief moment where it seems like the film will finally dig in and settle down, but before you know it Seidl has sprinted off down a completely new path—now you’re hearing about the birthplace of John Steinbeck or the U.S. Patriot Act, and you’re never quite sure how you got there, or why.
Stylistically, too, the film is a mess. It’s shot on digital video, which gives the interviews all the professionalism of a homemade prom tape, and Seidl uses every manipulative trick in the book to get her various points across: statements about the nobility of the librarian get a schmaltzy string accompaniment, and descriptions of government budget cuts use slow-motion shots for that extra little splash of cliché. Some films in the montages are identified, and some aren’t. Some of the librarians being interviewed are identified twice; most of the prisoners, not once.
These, then, are some of the things librarians cannot do, according to The Hollywood Librarian: defeat the frumpy Hollywood stereotype, compete for government funding with wars overseas, prevent a dystopian future (as dramatized by Battlefield: Earth and Zardoz). Oh, and make for a compelling documentary.
