When my grandmother started to lose it, she was ingenious in masking it. If you asked her who was president, she’d say, “that fool in the White House.” If you asked her about something topical, she’d reply, “Who has time for such things?” It was her game face as her memory began to fail her.

At the beginning of I’ll Be Me, this is where we find Glen Campbell, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He is vague, folksy and stubborn in attempting to defend himself from a world ever more foreign to him. He leans heavily on his wife, who acts as his lifeline to his past, but we see his true state when he watches old home movies, and asks “who is that?” It’s achingly painful to hear his wife’s reply, “That’s you, silly.”

Campbell’s diagnosis came on the eve of his final tour, and in an effort to increase awareness about the disease, he went public and allowed a documentary crew along for the ride. The result is a bittersweet retrospective of his work (I had no idea just how big a star he was) and an examination of what it is to suffer this disease through the eyes of his family (three kids are in his touring band). I feared that this might become exploitative and was heartened to see that not only was it not, but that Campbell’s wife acknowledged the concern, explaining that they weighed the costs and benefits and decided to go forth. I also feared that it would be altered to create a “triumph of the spirit” vibe, but director James Keach (an actor in his own right and Stacy’s brother) presents Campbell and the disease in sober fashion; when Campbell’s issues become acute, it is almost too much to bear, and when they evince on stage (as is shown on the clip above), it is not sugar-coated. But the audience is with him, so are we and the fact that his music is so ingrained in him it triumphs over the disease, for a time, is a wonder to watch.

Currently on Netflix Streaming.

This a great time capsule documentary, providing insight into the post WW II Soviet Union cult of supremacy as manifested in its hockey program. The Soviet military actually ran the tryouts at the Red Army school, winnowing out of the weak and fusing sport with propaganda. The result was a juggernaut that came of age right at the moment it ran into the American team in 1980 at Lake Placid. After that ignominy (the Russians had just beaten the Americans in an exhibition 10-3), the team did not lose a game for the two years prior to Sarajevo, where they won gold, and again, in 1988.

However, the toll on the players was brutal. They spent their time in hockey camps 11 months of the year, and the coach, Viktor Tikhonov, would not even allow a player see his dying father. Perestroika loosened some of the restrictions, but still, Tikhonov, would not permit his best defenseman, Slava Fedisov, to go to the NHL.   Fedisov quit over the prohibition, made his displeasure public, and was ostracized for his impunity.  On the light side, he was denied training facilities. On the harsher, the police in Kiev picked him up, beat him, and then called Tikhonov to pick him up. Eventually, the Soviets allowed the players to play in the NHL, but they took half their salaries (Fetisov said no and was the first Soviet hockey player to get his full check) .

The footage – especially of the fluidity of the Soviet team – is dazzling, and the interviews of any number of direct but impatient Russians are sharp and revealing. The documentarian, Gabe Polsky, is to be commended for including footage of his broad questions, where he stretches to get a response on larger geopolitical issues, only to get a “stupid question” from the “suffer no fools” Fedisov. In fact, it was a stupid question, but we learn more in Fedisov’s curt comment than had he answered the stupid question.

Rory Kennedy’s Academy Award nominated documentary opens with American Captain Stuart Herrington asking, “The burning question. Who goes and who stays?” When it went bad, Herrington took his South Vietnamese friends out surreptitiously (Americans were not allowed to bring South Vietnamese out without authorization), but the move was not expected nor planned for.  As Herrington explains, as do others, after the Paris Accords, the presumption of most in-country Americans was that peace was at hand, and the Americans would be in South Vietnam for a long time.

This film shows the feel on the ground for the last denizens of Saigon, while adding insight on a geopolitical level. For example, the North Vietnamese took very seriously the threat of Nixon bringing back American air power after execution of the accords – as one interviewee states, the North Vietnamese thought Nixon was a madman – but after Watergate and the “madman’s” self-inflicted wound, they were naturally emboldened. “Overnight, everything changed. Hanoi suddenly saw the road to Saigon as being open.”

With 16 divisions bearing down on Saigon, Herrington recounts how Ambassador Graham Martin wouldn’t countenance plans for evacuation because it was defeatist and he feared a panic (Martin is a tragic figure who lost his only son in combat in Vietnam, and while he is criticized for his intransigence, he also saved hundreds of South Vietnamese by refusing to leave the embassy until more civilians were evacuated).

At the end, there were 6,000 Americans still in country, and Martin held firm even after he returned to the United States to watch President Ford’s $722 million request for an evacuation voted down.  At this juncture, embassy staff began to risk their careers to get South Vietnamese compatriots out in makeshift airlifts to the Philippines, and at the very end, in any other way they could find.  Their stories are harrowing.

There is no political agenda here.  Kennedy’s documentary is about people, not policy, and their stories are engrossing.  One Vietnamese evacuee recalls his father, a pilot in the South Vietnamese, picking his family in a Chinook and heading out to sea (“when I heard the Chinook, I knew my Dad was coming to get me”).  When it couldn’t land on an American vessel, the occupants jumped out to be fished from the water.

Much of the footage is simply jaw-dropping. A scene of a modern World Airways passenger jet taking off with its on-board stairs lowered, hustling panicked South Vietnamese on as it hurtles down the runway, is indelible.  Another is footage of the pick-up points (Americans knew when to go to them; the code was the playing of “White Christmas” on the radio”) as South Vietnamese press the buses for entry to helicopter evacuations, one of the last options available after the North Vietnamese closed down the airport with artillery fire.  Or the American naval vessels that became deposit points for South Vietnamese helicopter pilots, who had flown from their air bases to pick up their families and then headed to sea hoping for the best.  The ships could only accommodate one helicopter at a time, so when one landed, and its passengers disembarked, the crewmen pushed it over the side to make room for the next.

A must see.