The audience for this absorbing documentary is anyone interested in mystery, crime and, well, history.  The film is ostensibly a profile of novelist James Ellroy, but its true subject matter is post-war America’s trip into the shadows.  First off, a confession:  Ellroy is one of my all-time favorite writers, so bear that in mind as you read on.  This 2001 film, directed by Oscar-winning producer Vikram Jayanti, is a window into a topic that’s pretty fascinating even if done half-way intelligently, and Feast of Death is considerably smarter than that.  In fact, I’d argue that this DVD belongs in libraries across the country as a compelling historical document—not just on an important author, but on Americans' cultural obsession with crime in all its manifestations, both real and fictional.  More importantly, its somewhat impressionistic approach to the material, which may frustrate those who want a more substantial narrative through-line, is suggestive of the dark personal connections between the two.

While both the title and the marketing copy for the film suggest that Ellroy’s role here is that of a kind of voyeuristic host who presents true crime’s greatest hits, that’s only part of what’s going on; granted, it’s certainly the guiding structural principle at work in this spiraling and at times oddly-paced work.  And yes, the author of arguably the best cop novel and best serial killer novel of the past generation (L.A. Confidential and Killer on the Road respectively) is our tour guide, but not on some tawdry travelogue à la something you’d find on E!.  Rather, Ellroy—via Jayanti—takes us on a journey of undercurrents and shadowy kinships, not a tabloid-like exhumation of facts for their own sake.  To be sure, physical places are important here, but often the greatest sense of eeriness comes not from their evocation of the dramatic past or their power to induce us to rubber-necking, but actually the opposite:  we see the sites of the body dump of Elizabeth Short and the assassination of JFK and their ordinariness is what strikes us.  Indeed, it’s in this way that James Ellroy’s Feast of Death acts to transfigure the everyday.  In a series of scenes in which Ellroy drives about nighttime L.A. with some cop buddies, shining lights on building facades and sharing the locale’s associations for him, we see no pedestrians and few other cars.  The only sound is that of the men speaking of past crimes that seem to live most strongly in their minds and which they project onto the landscape.  We get the feeling that America itself has been entombed alive and perhaps no one even noticed it.

Well, no one except Ellroy.  In one amusing segment he admits his goal in life is to outlive Bill Clinton so that he can tell the true story of the corrupt ‘90s without fear of reprisal, and that’s a key to how he sees himself.   Ellroy had the lid of normalcy lifted off of his world at an early age due to the murder of his mother—to this day an unsolved case—and views his mission as returning the favor for the rest of our culture.  A brash, foul-mouthed, and hyper-articulate raconteur, he is rarely less than entertaining when on screen, especially when working a crowd at a bookstore appearance.

  But Ellroy is also disarmingly candid and unvain, and at those times one almost senses that his neo-hipsterism and hardboiled carnival barker persona are distancing techniques of a sort.  Similarly, the detectives with whom he breaks bread (in The Pacific Dining Car no less, featured so prominently in his fiction) are street smart and superficially coarse, but also reflective and even sensitive on deeper levels; the doc really captures something special and elegiac when they express that regarding certain homicide victims, they’re the only ones who cherish and honor their memories.  The observations I’m making here are hardly new when it comes to crime literature (see David Simon’s seminal book Homicide, the basis for the TV series) but it’s rare that a non-fiction film can develop such themes so effectively.  This notion of abrasively honest sentimentality holds especially true for the sections of the film that feature Ellroy’s voice-over reading from My Dark Places.  This acclaimed memoir mostly represents his coming to terms with his relationship to both his mother’s life and her death, and the passages here derive an extra power from their verbal delivery.  With an inflection that is both flat and impassioned at the same time, Ellroy’s words fall like rain that just won’t stop; it’s their cumulative impact that’s so devastating.

Yet James Ellroy’s Feast of Death is not a straight adaptation of My Dark Places or a record of its book tour.  It’s both more and less than that.  “Less” because we often get summaries and snippets of epic periods of Ellroy’s life, which may create the impression in those who haven’t read his work that he is glib or, worse, a poseur.  “More” because we are exposed to other viewpoints, not just Ellroy’s or those of the filmmakers (who, to their credit, stand just far enough from their subject to keep him in focus and just close enough to bring out the intriguing details).  For example, we get a memorable scene with Ellroy’s wife, Helen Knode, who comes across as thoroughly engaging in her own right (you could make another doc just on their marriage).  We also get an extended section of Black Dahlia expert Larry Harnisch holding forth on his solution to that notorious case.  (For a mesmerizing narration-less twenty-minute video montage of his conclusions, click here.)

Still, Ellroy himself is pretty much front and center the whole time, which is probably how it should be.  But instead of creating redundancy and overkill, Jayanti builds ideas and emotions wonderfully, if at times almost too subtly.  In the effortlessly haunting closing minutes he uses the old snow-as-metaphor-for-death conceit but still manages to extract power from it.  The result is that we sense the ultimate impotence and absurdism that runs through the human condition but also a sense of the majesty.  The message is, life may be nasty, but there’s also a lot more to it than most of us imagine.  So maybe it’s time to expand our list of the things we’re willing to take a long, hard look at.  Not doing so, this film might argue, is tantamount to never venturing outside at night because, after all, what is there to see when there’s no sunlight?  In a word, plenty.