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‘Lula’ Review: An Incomplete Portrait of Brazil’s Fiery Left-Wing President
With 'Lula,' Oliver Stone serves as both filmmaker and on-screen interviewer in a blinkered political exploration.
However, despite its handful of rousing moments, the documentary — about Brazil’s current pro-worker president, Lula da Silva — comes from a limited perspective that prevents a fuller examination of the man, his myth and the people who believe in him. Old photographs and anecdotes of Lula’s early days as a union leader (starting in the 1970s) make for an adequate window into his rags-to-revolutionary story, but the quickness with which Stone jumps from one topic to the next prevents the film from being impactful. Editors Mark Franks, Kurt Mattila and Alexis Chavez certainly deserve credit for their propulsive assembly, but in the process, Stone and Wilson are rendered mere curious middlemen, whose direction (and more importantly, whose wholesale conceptualization) of Lula’s story seldom illuminates the more interesting contours of his life.
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