Lightning Over Water: Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray

In just a few weeks, legendary American director Nicholas Ray will be dead, his body ravaged by cancer and his spirit eroded by decades of disappointment, failure, and artistic impotence. After years and years of battling against ignorant studio executives, Ray (the director of such masterpieces as In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955)) looks like a skeleton with a single layer of skin stretched over it. And yet, in his final days, Ray is still making movies. The film in this case is Lightning Over Water, a co-production with German director and Ray disciple Wim Wenders. A documentary with a few obviously staged scenes sprinkled about here and there, Lightning Over Water is a living document of the last moments of one of the Great American Iconoclasts. Ray and Wenders talk and talk and talk about the "old days" of Hollywood, of the cinema itself, and, of course, of the inevitability of death. We see Ray give a lecture after a screening of The Lusty Men (1952) at Vassar, direct a one-man stage performance of Franz Kafka's "A Report for an Academy," and, in one of the film's bravest and most devastating moments, sputter through a grotesque cough attack that reduces him to a shriveled husk on his bed. Lightning Over Water is a difficult film to watch as it contains nothing less than the destruction and apotheosis of a cinematic maverick.

8/10