MUBI

While Fast, Cheap and Out of Control lacks the pure cinematic weight of Gates of Heaven and the irresistible drollery of Vernon, Florida, it perhaps is Morris’s most masterfully structured film. Its thematic meaning—which is as profound as any philosophical treatise—all issues simply from the weaving of footage from the film’s four interviews: the men sit and say what they will, and Morris creates from it. For instance, the topiary gardener, while explaining the patience required for his profession, says, “it’s just cut and wait, cut and wait”. Such a mundane remark (mundane here) is, in the highly crafted framework of Morris’s film, elevated to absolute poetry on time, humanity, and anything else one see’s fit to relate it to. Such are the surprises waiting—and staying (no directorial commentary ever points it out)—behind every scene.

The film confronts death and the conundrum of existence the only way such cumbersome concepts should be broached in art: not by direct representation through allegory (see The Seventh Seal) or by a torrent of violent deaths calculated to make you fear your own demise—Morris leaves these weighty issues where they normally lie, behind the everyday words of conversation, behind the routine actions of living, and wisely refuses to dredge them up directly onto the screen. (“By indirections find directions out.”)