Review: Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie

Full disclosure: I’m far from a Louis Theroux fan. I’ve watched some of his docos on TV, especially enjoyed his ones on “The Most Hated Family in America”, but I generally find him creepy, impossibly smug, condescending, and irritatingly insincere. With this 2016 doco on The Church of Scientology he has, for me reached his nadir. 2015 gave us a really terrific documentary on Scientology with “Going Clear”, 2016 gives us Louis and this useless piece crap directed by John Dower. You see, “Going Clear” was an interesting and informative documentary, despite the seemingly secretive nature of the Church of Scientology. There’s plenty of meat to chew on, and quite a number of talking heads to offer their insight. Our chap Louis, having met resistance and restriction in his pursuit of making a documentary about Scientology, got pretty much bugger all, and decides to press on making the movie anyway. It’s idiotic, Louis and Dower should’ve cut their losses and made a different film, because what he comes up with here is almost less than nothing. They had to know going in that they weren’t going to have a lot to work with, surely.

 

Louis has been critical of the ‘talking heads’ approach of “Going Clear”, but his alternative is to show footage of real-life statements from Scientologists…and then gives us completely unconvincing re-enactments of the footage we’ve already seen. He hires ‘actors’ to play Scientology head David Miscavige and star recruit Tom Cruise like he’s making a feature film. The thing is, though, he’s really not. It’s just shit he’s putting into his documentary to fill time because he couldn’t really make the movie he wanted to. It’s desperate, stupid, and pointless filler all because Louis couldn’t get enough real access to the Church and its members. Fine, don’t make the fucking movie then, right? Nah, Louis doesn’t work like that, because he’s an insincere, passive aggressive twat. So he goes ahead and makes a smart-arsey documentary about making a mockumentary based on real footage he’s also showing us for…reasons, I guess.

 

His one real ‘source’ here is ex-Scientology 2^nd in Command Marty Rathbun, but he doesn’t make the best use of him or his insight for the most part. In fact, Marty is on hand to help out in the re-enactments and coach performances from the ‘actors’. Theroux tries to call the mock ‘tech’ sessions/re-enactments ‘squirreling’, which is a term used to describe unsanctioned Scientology practices. Nope, you’re just making shit up and re-enacting stuff on camera. That’s not the same thing. This is so infantile (making “South Park” look rather sophisticated, really), thoroughly beneath Louis Theroux, who although I’m not a fan, has done much, much better than this shit. It doesn’t even play remotely like any of his other documentaries (at least not his more serious ones), it’s completely different and not in any good or productive way. All of the paranoid ‘I’m being followed!’ stuff is just made up bullshit that a pro like Theroux should consider well beneath him. Scientology is crazy and suspicious enough that he didn’t need to make crap up, too.

 

I’m sorry, but this film shouldn’t have been released. It’s an insult to not only a paying audience (thankfully I saw it on television, albeit pay TV), but frankly any audience to put something like this out there. There’s some brief interview stuff like a traditional Theroux doco, but not nearly as much as usual. Surely even Louis has to be kind of embarrassed by this film. It’s not even fucking funny. At all. The Church of Scientology is a fascinating subject for a doco, “Going Clear” showed that. Here the only interesting thing is Rathbun himself, and I don’t think Theroux deserves the credit for that. Rathbun’s cagey, irritable, and you’re never quite sure about him. Louis isn’t quite sure about him, though he eventually kinda throws Rathbun under the bus a little bit by the end, which I thought was at the very least rather uncharitable (I wouldn’t be surprised if Theroux throws Dower under the bus for this pointless piffle).

 

A useless, uninformative, unamusing load of nothingness from a filmmaker who should know better than to press forward with a film when there’s clearly not enough for him to work with to form a full-length documentary. Hell, the employment of actors for the re-enactments pretty much serves to put the entire thing into further question. This should never have seen the light of day, and I don’t think Louis Theroux fans will disagree with me all that strenuously, either.

 

Rating: D