The title of My Father and the Man in Black seems apt: Writer/director Jonathan Holiff is the son of the late Saul Holiff, who served as the personal manager of country-music superstar Johnny Cash. By all accounts, the senior Holiff was a cold, distant, and aloof figure to his son, incommunicative and incapable of showing affection. Saul quietly taped and squirreled away dozens of hours of telephone conversations with Cash, and the discovery of these audio reels inspired Jonathan to create a documentary profile of his dad. The filmmaker's goals were twofold: to understand his enigmatic and troubled father, and to explore the Holiff/Cash dynamic as it shifted over time, especially in response to Cash's much publicized conversion to born-again Christianity in 1971 -- a spiritual awakening that alienated Saul, an agnostic Jew, and ended their business partnership.
The central conceit here sounds mesmerizing, and the story retains de facto interest by virtue of Cash's musical stature, but Holiff's presentation is amateurish and sophomoric. He leans so heavily on ill-conceived dramatic reenactments -- both of scenes from Saul and Cash's lives and events in his own life -- that the film almost defies one to label it as a documentary. Its closest antecedent would probably be something akin to Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt's semi-documentary This Is Elvis, but My Father and the Man in Black is a much weirder bird -- mainly because the reenactments themselves are so professionally lit, filmed, and staged that they look like excerpts from some unreleased biopic of Cash's life. Well, almost; in a gaffe so obtuse that it nearly stops the movie in its tracks, Holiff has the actor who portrays Saul mouth the words on the audio recordings that play on the soundtrack -- though the actor's lips are several seconds out of synch with the dialogue. This catastrophically undermines the professionalism of the lighting, blocking, and direction.
Also, as in countless recent documentaries by other directors, Holiff leans far too heavily on CGI effects such as superimpositions, wipes, and matte effects, which aren't convincing for a second; you can see all of the seams, and they look ghastly. This is also true of Holiff's questionable decision to toy with vintage photographs by making the central figures "stand out," three-dimensionally, from the backdrops; the effect is tacky. We're getting to the point where every first- or second-time director with access to a video-editing suite believes that he or she can do studio-level post-production with flashy aftereffects, and it is particularly unwelcome here.
The documentary also raises a vital question: If, as indicated by the production notes and one of the reenactments, Holiff discovered countless hours of telephone conversations between his father and Cash, why do we get so few of these actual recordings on the audio track? There are some, to be certain, but they seem curiously underutilized.
Above all else, what we have here is a classic case of a filmmaker trying to reinvent the wheel of documentary language with a lot of flash and wow, when in truth, a traditional presentation would have been far more effective. The omission of interviews is particularly injurious. How about an on-camera discussion with Kris Kristofferson? Or Rosanne Cash? Or Robert Elfstrom, the director of Johnny and June Carter Cash's movie The Gospel Road? Or Jonathan Holiff's brother Joshua? How about more extensive archival footage from Cash's ABC variety program, The Johnny Cash Show? All of those elements would have helped undergird the story with much needed authenticity; what is onscreen, despite the occasional dramatic strength of the material surrounding Cash's Christian faith, suggests a lot of doctored-up contrivance that robs the movie of whatever credibility it might have possessed in the hands of a more adroit filmmaker.