Movie Review: Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop is so self-aware, so tightly built out of and around the mechanisms of art and film and pretension, that it’s almost impossible to describe it without making yourself sound like one of the characters within it, and that applies equally to this next sentence, true though it is: This movie is an instant classic, a shoe-in for Best Documentary 2010 Oscar, a documentary about documentaries, a work of art that encapsulates and explains works of non-art, an apologia and a manifesto rolled into one.

I saw it without having any preconception of what it was about, and despite this review, I encourage you to do the same. In film school, screenwriters are taught to make their endings surprising yet inevitable, and Exit Through The Gift Shop has such an ending, all the more disturbing and hilarious because it takes place in real life.

At one level, this is the straightforward story of Thierry Guetta, compulsive self-documentarian. As the youngest of a large family, events leading up to his mother’s early death were hidden from him so that he was both shocked by her death and angered by his siblings’ shielding him from reality. He becomes a man obsessed with documenting every moment. Fortuitously, he falls in with the front-runners of the international graffiti art movement, who respect his dogged work ethic, his willingness to keep their secrets even at great risk to himself, and his eagerness to participate rather than simply observe. For the first half of the movie, this is what the story seems to be, and it’s a great story. And yet, something is off. We’re not watching a documentary by Guetta. We’re watching a documentary by Bansky, who is one of Guetta’s subjects…

At another level, we have a film by, and about, Banksy, the most famous and perhaps the most talented guerilla artist in the world. Certainly one of the most gutsy. He hangs his own paintings in museums. He chains a Gitmo-esque dummy prisoner to a fence inside Disneyland. Uncatchable, unfilmable, the ultimate uncompromising artist, Banksy’s friendship and trust becomes the focus of Guetta’s life. It happens. Guetta proves to be the perfect, trustworthy companion to Banksy. He captures fascinating and unique footage of the artist at work, in the studio and on the street. For a while, then, it seems that *this* is what the documentary is actually about. But the question lingers: why is Banksy the one credited with directing the movie we’re actually watching… the movie about the discovery of himself, mostly made of footage shot by Thierry Guetta?

There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of fictional examinations of what happens next; Being There and Henry Fool stand out as the most obvious, and there are shades here of Zelig, Wag The Dog, Being John Malcovich, and King Of Comedy. But never has the timeless tale of will-to-celebrity and genius-meets-mediocrity been rendered so clearly (and, it must be said, artfully) out of actual reality as it is here. As one embarrassing outrageousness tops the next, the viewer realizes that Banksy has made this film as a form of damage control. As private and mysterious a man as he is (or used to be), Banksy recognizes that the only way to distance himself from the sensational train wreck that Guetta becomes is to meticulously document the way in which he inadvertently helped bring the whole thing about.

He succeeds beautifully. Exit Through The Giftshop is a straightforward, plausible story about an erratic, ridiculous story; both true. It’s a story told by a minor character within the story told by one of the major characters; a plot that could have been invented by Borges, if it had been invented at all. Banksy has never explained his work before, and he doesn’t explain it now, although the work itself is full of those who strive to explain their own role within it, some more successfully than others.

This is the standard by which all future self-referential documentaries will be judged.

Image by Banksy.