The Sweetest Sound

The Sweetest Sound (2001)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281249/]

The Gist:
This is a documentary that I watched the first twenty or so minutes in a film class and was interested enough to track it down and finish it off. It's about the director's obsession with names, with identity, and particularly his own name and what it says about his own identity. The director goes so far as to contact all of the "Alan Berliner's in the world" and invite them over to dinner. He gets a solid handful and he interviews them a bit but nothing really comes out of it, which the director readily admits. But that's the film's problem, despite the director's honesty about nothing really coming out of the meeting. In the beginning, when he is exploring the nuance of names (for instance how Alan sounds soft and gentle and Al sound macho and how Al Capone could never have been named Alan Capone) or when he is exploring his own weird reservations of having his name shared by so many different people in the world the film works very well. But it is sort of built around this final meeting, you can tell the director shaped the film around the idea that by setting up this meeting the film would lead itself into new and surprising areas and instead it just sat idle. In the end, the film becomes a fascinating yet anti-climatic film, lacking the dramatic heft of better documentaries.