‘Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb’ Review: An Enthralling Book-World Documentary
18.06.2022 - 04:59
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThe enthralling documentary “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” opens with white-on-black credits accompanied by the staccato pecks of a typewriter, which will be music to some viewers’ ears. Robert Caro, the author at the center of the documentary, writes towering books of nonfiction — “The Power Broker,” his 1,280-page study of how Robert Moses literally shaped the city of New York, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his four-volume biography that’s currently awaiting its fifth and final volume — but taps out these imperially detailed and captivating tomes on an old electric typewriter, X-ing out passages as he goes along, backing up each page with an extra sheet and a piece of carbon paper.
You can’t get much more analog than that. As “Turn Every Page” reveals, Caro is still married to the methods of the last century; the digital revolution hasn’t touched him.
It’s up to us to decide if this is merely a charming quirk or somehow mysteriously integral to the fact that Caro has been hailed as the greatest biographer of his time. I would say the latter.
“Turn Every Page,” which is about the relationship between Caro and his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb (it’s really the story of both men), is a love letter to many aspects of the publishing world that have more or less fallen by the wayside. The movie was directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, who is Robert Gottlieb’s daughter, and if that makes it sound like a cozy family affair, the film is meticulously evenhanded and revealing.
The real family it’s about is the fraternity of Caro and Gottlieb, who’ve been working together for 50 years. The two almost never see each other outside of editing sessions, but when
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