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This years Tribeca Film Festival includes two documentaries about truly legendary performers.
(These are deferential, at times often promotional documents.)
They both demonstrate the limitations of trying to explicate genius.
Talking heads can honor Alvin Aileys choreography; they can pay tribute to Rita Morenos spirit of tungsten steel.
A thousand productions have not made it grow old.
When and why did Ailey stop dancing?
The first question arises but is never answered; the last one isnt even broached.
Where was his gay community?
Rita Moreno, on the other hand, isdelightedto break her silence.
Rieras documentary seems to pick up mid-anecdote theres little evidence Moreno ever gives silence a fighting chance.
At 89 (87 at the time of filming), she has found a second (third?
In fact, all attention makes her purr.
Look, you want to vibrate like a lightning bolt at this age?
You need a healthy ego.
Her agent raped her, she says, matter-of-factly, and she didnt even fire him.
She only offers hints at what makes up her craft.
She finds herself magnetic, which then turns every eye.
It helps that shes starstruckby herself.
Rieras documentary produced by Norman Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda is itself a little starstruck.
These tend to cover the same ground, and many fail to add any dimension to her portrait.
Its worth asking about what could have been.
Both Rita Moreno and Alvin Ailey were born in 1931.
They are, or were, exact contemporaries.
And for that matter, what if Ailey had lived to a late, Moreno-ish Renaissance in the 2010s?
They have both done so much, its greedy to ask for more.
But while both documentaries are records of staggering achievement, they are also evidence of a theft.
An unjust world stole her youth and his old age and it will not give them back.
