Smiling Through the Apocalypse Review

No decade is as celebrated, obsessed over, or mined for pop culture as the 1960s.  The British Invasion, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, and countless other events and influences make the '60s the decade that all angsty high schoolers wish they'd been born in.  Plenty of documentaries have tackled various aspects of the era, and now another joins the ranks: Tom Hayes' Smiling Though the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s.

From the title, one might glean that this isn't a documentary that immediately deals with the turbulent events of those years.  Rather, it's one step removed, chronicling the chronicling of those historical and cultural events.  It allows Hayes to tackle a broad swathe of subjects by focusing on one: the pages (and covers) of Esquire Magazine.

First-time filmmaker Hayes - who serves as director, writer, producer, and editor on the film - is just the one to bring this subject matter to the screen.  His father, Harold Hayes, served as Esquire's editor at the time, so talking about the magazine is really talking about the director's father.  The magazine, he says, was a direct reflection of his father's voice, opinions, and viewpoint.  The elder Hayes was a giant in the industry, working his way up from the bottom of the totem pole on much smaller magazines, and eventually leading the charge on an exquisite, voracious, and incendiary magazine.

That Hayes is a novice behind the camera often shows, but it luckily isn't to the detriment of the film overall.  Talking heads are sometimes oddly framed, without an established, consistent aesthetic to the film's many interviews.  The bigger issue, and one that would surely be difficult for Hayes to avoid, is the sense of adoration the film drips with.  His father is practically treated as a saint, with only one story (about the magazine's treatment of Gloria Steinem) adding a shade of gray.  The film is a eulogy for Harold Hayes, and a supremely loving one at that, but the obvious nepotism skewers the documentary's objectivity.

Smiling Through the Apocalypse is more effective, and just as affecting, as a eulogy for print journalism.  It hearkens back to an era where piercing literary voices, from Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Esquire's early years to Nora Ephron and Peter Bogdanovich during Hayes' tenure, were given ample space to articulate bold ideas.  Harold Hayes allowed his writers to tackle controversial subjects in even more controversial ways.  It was an unflinching, bold publication, the kind that would be hard-pressed to find readers in today's society, always looking for news in bite-sized portions.  Tom Hayes describes his father as a time traveler, having to focus on three issues at a time, each at a different stage of production.  While one went to the presses with articles on the news of a few months prior, another was in its beginning stages, with a third somewhere in between.  There was a time when news was handled with such care, thoughtfully arranged and presented with bite and vigor, rather than instantaneously spewed onto the internet for every to see, and no one to care about.

In the documentary's simplicity, it becomes an ironic counterpart to its subject matter.  It allows the stories of the writers to shine; they're given a similar space to reminisce as they were to write in Esquire's pages.  But it also pales in comparison to their reporting, so standard and flavorless is its chronicle of a beloved, bygone era.