Movies into Film

A Letter to True

Directed by Bruce Weber

USA, 2003

A Letter to True was one of my favorites from the 30th annual Seattle International Film Festival last spring. The movie resurfaces in at least two locations this month: from September 8-21 at the Film Forum in New York as well as a couple of Pacific Northwest screenings at the 5th annual Port Townsend Film Festival, September 24-26. Here’s the review I initially posted on May 30, 2004.

Marketed as innocuous, sentimental fluff about a man and his dog, Bruce Weber’s A Letter to True encompasses an ocean of high and low. Alternately cozy and challenging, the film makes me regret that Weber doesn’t make movies more often. While A Letter to True doesn’t reach Let’s Get Lost, the director’s seminal documentary about Chet Baker, it ranges over subjects from Dirk Bogarde at Provence to rednecks splashing into mud puddles, from an androgynous Elizabeth Taylor look-alike, persons with AIDS, and Haitian refugees to the Vietnam War photography of Larry Burrows, Martin Luther King Jr., so-called “cats for peace,” and Jimmy Durante songs.

Whenever the movie threatens to go terribly askew, Weber’s impeccable taste in jazz standards saves the day. At one point, for instance, he announces that, “Like the rest of us,” his dog so-and-so (he owns several in addition to True) “is still recovering from the effects of September 11.” No sooner had I silently uttered, “Bullshit!” than Weber cues Blossom Dearie’s superb 1958 recording of Rodgers and Hart’s greatest song, “Manhattan,” to accompany a mostly black-and-white montage of dog-walking in New York. There’s a bit of Ground Zero footage, yet Weber doesn’t dwell on it (he never dwells on anything); still—even though I have that particular Blossom Dearie CD and have listened to it hundreds of times—I don’t think I’ll ever hear the closing phrase “I’ll take Manhattan” in quite the same way again.

Weber’s dogs live better than most humans. We first see them running and swimming along high color saturation shots of sunshine-imbued Montauk beach. They have their own massage therapists, fur groomers and, oh yes, they go surfing; in one certifiably nutty sequence, Weber acknowledges the canines’ status as sex substitutes: amid white-green waves cresting, swimmers caress golden retrievers as passionately as lovers.

Surf’s up with the Pooch in A Letter to True (Photo: Just Blue Films)

A Letter to True manages to be stringently anti-war and pro-veteran, to find more relevant political content in old Lassie movies than I would have dreamed possible, and to pay tribute to Jonathan Demme for making The Agronomist (a film I vehemently disliked) while making a stronger, more affecting statement on Haiti in the space of five minutes than Demme accomplished in ninety.

The highest point arrives too soon. Weber relates the memory of a photo shoot with Dirk Bogarde, and as Bogarde boozily reminisces about his years in Provence, the soundtrack soars with Ella Fitzgerald’s transcendent interpretation of Billy Strayhorn’s “Something to Live For.” A few viewers might have been happy to remain at that level of elegance, without going into the muck to which Weber later subjects us. I would’ve. Give me Julie Christie reading Rilke any day over the puddle-hopping white trash farmboys whom Weber’s eye fancies. We need them both, A Letter to True charitably reinforces. – NPT

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