Movie Review: Polanski Unauthorized Is Uninspired

You know how people say a movie is dream-like? Polanski Unauthorized is dream-like in the sense that it is a disjointed sequence of events, jumping from decade to decade. You might come out of it with nothing more than a general feeling: that the infamous director and sometime actor Roman Polanski is a oily creature, slimier than a salamander and more distasteful than a mouthful of caster oil.

You can make some sense of it if you know something of his history--something more than he is a fugitive from the U.S. legal system. He was found guilty of having sexual relations with a minor--a 13-year-old girl whom he supplied with alcohol before having sexual relations with her. He was in his forties.

Sounds like something out of American Beauty, but his excuse, in this movie, is that she was not a virgin. If you recall, the character played by Kevin Spacey recoiled from accomplishing the seduction of the young girl because she was inexperienced.

How does one measure the ick factor here? After all, Woodie Allen had a young girl in bed in his Manhattan. Is genius an excuse?

Yet I digress and that's easy to do. This film was directed by its star, Damian Chapa. Chapa doesn't look like Roman Polanski. He is physically doughy where Polanski seems thin. He does project a discomforting sort of playboy charm, one cultivated by men in search of women willing to take the casting couch route to fame.

The fractured segments touch on the Nazis in Poland, his mother's death in a concentration camp, his meeting with Sharon Tate, her tragic and horrific death and his filming of Rosemary's Baby. If you aren't familiar with the details of Polanski's story, you might be easily confused although long before the middle of the film, you'll be too bored to care.

Polanski Unauthorized is an uninspired impressionistic docudrama that is more vanity production than anything else.