Denied the tools of a Hollywood dream machine to naturalize the good life, indie film is forced to justify class privilege. Where Wes Anderson invites his audience to share in the absurdity of inherited wealth and Whit Stillman aestheticizes boundless yuppiedom, Rogers agonizes over his upper-crust circumstances.
Rogers shot compulsively around his parents' house in the affluent town of Wainscott in the Hamptons, home of the eponymous windmill which his mother (who was given to throwing out dark hints about inherited madness) apparently believed to be the literal incarnation of her own father.
Shown posing for her son's camera lounging in a lawn chair and sipping a drink while dressed in a mink coat in July -- and later clinging to the framelines, shrunken by cancer -- her ghost hovers over the well-appointed enclave which Rogers associates with summers filled with attractive bathing suit-clad women and dipsomania.
Meanwhile, in the movie-mad Hamptons community, Rogers, armed with his unfinished movie, began to acquire the legendary proportions of a home-grown Orson Welles carting around an uncompleted "The Other Side of the Wind."
Olch includes copious footage of Rogers rationalizing his duplicitous parallel affairs with two women who lived around the corner from each other, one being his lifelong partner and last-minute wife, shutterbug extraordinaire Susan Meiselas (who produced the film).
Detailed minutiae of the physical changes that befall Rogers, from the accidental and mildly heroic loss of three toes to the creeping melanoma that eventually killed him, find equal pride of place.
Rogers shot compulsively around his parents' house in the affluent town of Wainscott in the Hamptons, home of the eponymous windmill which his mother (who was given to throwing out dark hints about inherited madness) apparently believed to be the literal incarnation of her own father.
Shown posing for her son's camera lounging in a lawn chair and sipping a drink while dressed in a mink coat in July -- and later clinging to the framelines, shrunken by cancer -- her ghost hovers over the well-appointed enclave which Rogers associates with summers filled with attractive bathing suit-clad women and dipsomania.
Meanwhile, in the movie-mad Hamptons community, Rogers, armed with his unfinished movie, began to acquire the legendary proportions of a home-grown Orson Welles carting around an uncompleted "The Other Side of the Wind."
Olch includes copious footage of Rogers rationalizing his duplicitous parallel affairs with two women who lived around the corner from each other, one being his lifelong partner and last-minute wife, shutterbug extraordinaire Susan Meiselas (who produced the film).
Detailed minutiae of the physical changes that befall Rogers, from the accidental and mildly heroic loss of three toes to the creeping melanoma that eventually killed him, find equal pride of place.
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