Faking It

"David Hoffman had the camera!" the advertisements shriek. "Murray King had the guts!" All this hysterical flackery is on behalf of an ersatz documentary called King, Murray, which pompously passes itself off as a piece of "spontaneous fiction."

Hoffman and his co-film maker Jonathan Gordon focus blurrily on a corpulent little insurance hustler from Long Island named Murray King. In the cinema verite manner, they track him with camera and sound equipment from his office through some endless conferences to a business vacation at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, all the while mocking their subject and his legion of clients, chippies and hangers-on. Despite the documentary pretense, it turns out that many of the scenes were staged expressly for the film. Only diehard viewers who survive to the last few frames will get to see the strategically placed disclaimer.

In their search for "truth," Hoffman and Gordon have come up with a new genre, a kind of cinema mendicite that conveniently allows them to put a lot of gullible egomaniacs through their paces and exploit them at the same time. As might be expected from men of such scruples, the resultant film is tacky and insufferably condescending. It invites audiences to laugh at a pathetic, driven man, while the real clowns peek out from behind the cameras.

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