Review of Mike Wallace Is Here (2019) - A journalist who wrote history

These days mark the 8th anniversary of the death of journalist Mike Wallace. Long enough for someone to venture to review his work and his legacy. Avi Belkin directs a documentary that brings us closer to one of the most controversial journalistic figures of the second decade of the last century. Wallace left us hundreds of hours in front of the cameras that have served so that Belkin can address that legacy and show the journalist and the person who was hiding under the mask. Mike Wallace Is Here a journalist who wrote history and who now comes to Filmin.

Myron Leon "Mike" Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was a journalist who balanced his career between front-row reporting and his presence on the television set. His arrival on television occurred at the beginning of the 50s, and after a brief ten-year stint on the radio. That step that may seem natural and even desired, in the case of Wallace it was not so expected. He had always considered himself an ugly young man who tried to live hidden behind his voice, but surely the ambition that he hid that same mask was stronger than shyness.

The decades of the 50s and 60s were especially convulsive. Remember that the United States was going to live in those decades The Vietnam War, the moon landing, Watergate (yes, it is true that it is in 1972), and the assassinations of a president and the two most important rights activists from the black community, Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King. Mike Wallace not only lived those moments in the front row but also knew how to create together with Harry Reasoner (April 17, 1923 – August 6, 1991) and producer Don Hewitt (December 14, 1922 – August 19, 2009) the mythical program 60 minutes in 1968.

Wallace's figure grew along with the show, but it was much more than a TV show. 60 Minutes was continually a journalism lesson. Some did not agree with his methods, they harshly criticized him, attributing nicknames like Mike Malice (Mike Malice). But these Wallace-style detractors were also fostering the debate on television journalism. Because his style made us wonder what is acceptable and what is not in journalism.

And what was the Wallace style? Well, we can summarize it in a very basic journalistic concept: the interview. But the interview was hard, incisive, direct and often with questions that were unpleasant for the interviewee or even for an American society that was being beaten awake from sleep. He was a nosy and astute journalist. He knew how to play with the pauses and with the glances at the interviewee as if the interview were diluted in an interrogation. In a way, the interviewee submitted to a non-paternal judge. The format of the set could help him in very dark sets that fostered intimacy, but Wallace also moved into hotel corridors, the houses of the interviewees or the residence of presidents as in the case of Putin, or getting into a room with Ayatollah Khomeini and not wrinkle on THE question.

In a way, Wallace and 60 minutes put each issue in front of the camera to submit it to the guillotine of public opinion. Almost in the same way that today the director Avi Belkin shows us the figure of the journalist in that documentary. The director does not present us with a documentary, staying in the aspects that could be more favorable to the journalist, but rather he brings us more questions than answers. That journalism that built stories and that already raised, five decades ago, problems such as the superabundance of news, which since then understood journalism as an entrepreneurial business.

And Belkin doesn't leave the personal side forgotten in discarded footage. Through his own experiences, from that private part, his questions to other interviewees would later turn into questions that he should answer. The death of his son, depression and a suicide attempt are important pages that coexisted with that harsh journalism that he practiced and that he always tried to take its toll on.

Mike Wallace Is Here is a documentary and a character portrait of the time. They all knew what they were up against when they agreed to an interview with him, and yet they sat across from each other, perhaps wanting to be bolder or gain some consideration. To those already mentioned Malcolm X or Reverend King, a list made up of Eldon Edwards (leader of the Ku klux klan), Bette Davis, John F. Kennedy, Kirk Douglas, Donald Trump, Salvador Dalí or Richard Nixon among dozens of others is added. international political leaders and opinion leaders.

If, as stated in the documentary, the journalist writes history from the present as the historian writes about the past, there is no doubt that Mike Wallace wrote an important part of the history of the United States with his words and with his voice. .