Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer film review — demystifying study of a strange and varied career

You might know Werner Herzog as a great cinematic adventurer, as one of the re-inventors of modern German film, as the theorist of “ecstatic truth” in documentary — or you may know him as an intergalactic baddie in The Mandalorian or a cameo voice on The Simpsons. Thomas von Steinaecker’s Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer — released to accompany BFI Southbank’s Herzog retrospective — attempts gamely to fit these different faces into a portrait.

Herzog’s career has taken him from outsider experimentation; through spectacular struggles with the material challenges of filmmaking (most notoriously, heaving a riverboat over a hill in Amazonia for Fitzcarraldo); to a bizarre state of affairs in which, now 81 and resident in Los Angeles, he is a bona fide celeb, his rasping monotone one of the most recognisable voices in showbiz.

The film covers some very well-mapped ground — including the battles with legendarily combustible actor Klaus Kinski — along with some that is less familiar, illustrated by footage from the early years. Among the celebrities paying tribute, Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson and Patti Smith offer next to no insight, but Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff — two of Herzog’s contemporaries in the New German Cinema — have rather more to contribute, as do his brothers and his wives past and present.

Most importantly, von Steinaecker films his subject today: revisiting an early location, Herzog muses in diffident deadpan, “I did good battle here, and that was that.” A revealing moment comes at the waterfall near the Bavarian village where Herzog lived as a child, when he says (sternly, or self-mockingly?) “I’m not crying because of emotion.”

Von Steinaecker does more than due diligence, but the film can’t begin to account for the strangeness and variety of Herzog’s career. Where it scores, however, is in its welcome demystification: on one hand, a Promethean champion of the cinematically near-impossible, on the other an improbable world-class Good Sport.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from January 19