Celebrating Human Circus in ‘Fast, Cheap’

At a certain point in “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” Errol Morris’ strange but wonderful new documentary, wild-animal trainer Dave Hoover explains why a brandished chair is an effective foil for a lion. The four legs present four points of interest, and that confuses a beast who had been completely focused on “eating the guy in the white suit.”

A one-of-a-kind extravaganza by the most original talent now working in documentary film, the four-pronged “Fast, Cheap” has a similar potential to disorient audiences. Director Morris, whose previous films include “Gates of Heaven,” “The Thin Blue Line” and “A Brief History of Time,” is intent as always on pushing the envelope of nonfiction filmmaking, on cutting the form as much slack as he can while still remaining in complete control.

What that means here is linking four stories that have only the most tenuous thematic connections by means of fluid juxtapositions of image and sound. “Fast, Cheap” is an intoxicating collage put together (by Morris, Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson, composer Caleb Sampson and editors Shondra Merrill and Karen Schmeer) using nothing more than instinct and sensibility. It’s nervy filmmaking, like facing lions in a cage, that is as powerful as a dream to experience.

Links could of course be found between the four men profiled in “Fast, Cheap.” They all tell what the director himself has called “deeply weird animal stories,” they’re all restless intelligences searching for knowledge while trying to control the natural world. But even as these links are acknowledged, they seem beside the point. The truth, as Morris said when “Fast, Cheap” debuted at Sundance, is that this is “the ultimate low-concept film,” a quartet of stories linked only by the directors’ fascination with each of its characters.

Dave Hoover is, as noted, an animal trainer specializing in the big cats, as did his mentor and idol, the legendary Clyde Beatty. Now semi-retired, he’s a genial raconteur, spinning tales of life inside the ring and letting us know why you never, ever want to wear an expansion band wristwatch when lions are around.

Much more intense, though his animals are considerably smaller, is Ray Mendez, an authority on African mole-rats. These strange little beasts, with monster teeth capable of gnawing through concrete, have the distinction of being the only mammals who live in the same kind of complex society insects do. A photographer who designed a mole-rat habitat at the Philadelphia zoo, Mendez wears a butterfly-shaped bow tie and is positively gleeful about his favorite species.

Just as excited, though his specialty is not flesh and blood, is Rodney Brooks, one of MIT’s top robot scientists, who builds machines that are unnervingly lifelike. The same goes for the wild beasts sculpted with garden shears by George Mendonca, a topiary artist who’s worked at a Rhode Island estate called Green Animals for more than 20 years, turning privet and boxwood into giraffes and bears.

Using the Interrotron, a machine of Morris’ invention that enables interview subjects to look directly at the audience, these four tell tales of ordinary madness, offering tasty tricks of the trade and revealing how and why they do what they do. But that is only the first level of what “Fast, Cheap” has to offer.

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Added on next is footage by Richardson, who has shot almost all of Oliver Stone’s films (his Oscar was for “JFK”) and who has done an exceptional job infusing an air of strangeness and beauty to pictures of situations like that topiary garden and the three-ring action of the current Beatty circus.

Equally important is a hypnotic, driving score by Sampson (a founder of the Alloy Orchestra, admired for its silent film compositions) and a wide and impressive variety of other kinds of footage, everything from circus home movies to clips from Beatty-starring serials like “King of Jungleland.”

While there is minimal cohesion between the lives of the certified eccentrics the film investigates, all these varieties of film and sound are layered tightly together in the most artful way. Circus footage, for instance, will be on the screen while someone is talking about robots, and shots of robots will be intercut with kangaroos and ostriches. Even without conventional links, the whole thing hangs together beautifully. Don’t question this film’s structure, just let its images and connections wash over you. We’re all at the circus here, and Morris is an unconventional ringmaster whose sense of wonder never flags.

MPAA rating: PG, for mild thematic elements. Times guidelines: may be difficult for children to follow.

‘Fast, Cheap & Out of Control’

A Fourth Four Productions Inc. in association with American Playhouse production, released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Errol Morris. Producer Errol Morris. Executive producer Lindsay Law. Cinematographer Robert Richardson. Editors Shondra Merrill, Karen Schmeer. Music Caleb Sampson. Production design Ted Bafaloukos. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.