Ever seen Werner Herzog’s “Little Dieter Needs To Fly”? No? How about Werner Herzog’s “Rescue Dawn”? Still probably no, but a less likely “no,” because that film starred Christian Bale during that sweet spot of his career where he’d just made his debut as Batman and elevated his status in the doing. Neither film resonated much with a wider American audience, probably because nobody knew who Dieter Dengler was and they didn’t care to, which doesn’t speak well to the chances of David Schisgall’s new picture, “Theo Who Lived,” a documentary about Theo Padnos, aka Peter Theo Curtis, aka “that guy who got kidnapped by members of Jabhat al-Nusra in 2012.” His story is of the moment, but the moment happens to be ignorant of worldly affairs.
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And that’s too bad, because “Theo Who Lived” is a riveting work, if a bit too hemmed in by the boundaries of its running time. Eighty minutes and change hardly seems like a suitable space for the telling of Curtis’ tale, or more accurately for allowing him to tell his tale himself. It says a lot, then, that the film works in spite of its compression, though much of the credit for that should be given to Curtis: He’s a mercurial narrator, speedily relaying the details of his ordeal to the camera as he vaults from location to location along with Schisgall and his crew, pursuing the trail of his own abduction in an effort to reenact, recreate, and revisit the places he went while in the care of his jailers. He’s also resilient, because he must be, because who survives torture and imprisonment for two years only to return to the sites of their anguish on purpose?
You wonder, for a while, why Curtis agreed to do this, and then the film reaches the one-hour mark and you stop wondering. If you’re not familiar with Curtis’ travails, let the film do all of the required legwork for you: “In the fall of 2012,” an opening title card tells us, “freelance journalist Theo Padnos traveled to Syria to report on the country’s civil war. He slipped through the border from Turkey with local guides.” We get to hear this straight from Curtis’ mouth too once “Theo Who Lived” begins in earnest, but as a grounding gesture, the introduction helps. Curtis is such a tangle of energy, and such a font of knowledge, that the basic setup is a necessity: Without it, he might lose us.
This, of course, doesn’t explain the “why” of the film, though perhaps getting into that particular detail on paper would rob viewers of the film’s ultimate catharsis. Suffice to say, the fact that Curtis has an answer to the “why” at all is remarkable. “Theo Who Lived” is a cross-pollination of performance art and self-purging, a cleansing act that allows Curtis to face the demons that still torment him today from within the safety of a film production. He swings a bundle of cables around in an open field, viciously whipping at the ground with controlled force; he torches a prop church exterior, mimicking the actions of an old girlfriend (as realized in the pages of the novel he worked on during his years in captivity); he pantomimes the violence visited upon him at every stage of his confinement, and only appears to lose his composure in rare, key instances.
In the most notable of these moments, Curtis reviews footage of a televised interview with Matt Schrier, a war photographer who shared a cell with Curtis for several months before escaping in fulfillment of a plan they’d come up with together. The trick, of course, is that Schrier got away, while Curtis didn’t. When Curtis watches Schrier talk about the whole experience, we can see all of his usual poise crack almost immediately: Anger bubbles up through the crevices, and then come the denials of Schrier’s account. According to Schrier, he tried to help Curtis out of their cell. According to Curtis, Schrier did nothing of the sort. The idea of putting these two in a room together sounds like sensationalism, but Curtis’ spontaneous ire is compelling, begging to be explored in full.
“Theo Who Lived” doesn’t go there, and maybe that’s for the best. Picking at that scab might be the least appropriate thing the film could do. But watching Curtis simmer for the remainder of its duration draws attention to the unspoken reasons for the film’s conception: He’s a man in need of an exorcism. The sad truth is that as exorcisms, or exercises, go, even one so thorough as “Theo Who Lived” can’t fully assuage his suffering, or the suffering of his mother, his cousins, and all his loved ones, who each participate as talking heads to round out the narrative Schisgall observes through his lens. (Aside: That lens could use some calibration. “Theo Who Lived” often finds its subject leaning into the edge of the frame, out of our eyeline, as though composition is an unfitting way of capturing his spirit.)
At best, Curtis can keep his distress at bay by speaking his truth, or, in his words, by refusing to capitulate to the cycles of hatred that allow conflicts like the Syrian War to occur in the first place. One of the last images we see of him is on the shores of Lesbos, where he and other volunteers stand ready to greet Syrian refugees by the handful or by the dozen as they make their way from their homeland to shelter. This is telling: No sooner did Curtis go free than he threw himself right back out into the world to try and make it a better place, and in his resolve we’re taught the best lesson “Theo Who Lived” has to offer. All that’s left is to figure out who’ll play him in dramatized version of his life. [B]
