Becoming Cary Grant (2017)

I never thought anything could make Cary Grant boring, but these people certainly managed it! They took one of the all time Hollywood greats and created a snooze fest about him. I've seen many biographies about Cary, and enjoyed them all. I've seen almost all his movies, and thoroughly enjoyed them. So, I certainly thought I'd enjoy this. Nope! I wish I never saw it, because I will always have it in the back of my mind when thinking of Cary Grant. So, if you're a fan, stay away! Go watch a different biography of him. You'll learn just as much, but won't be left with a sour taste in your moth.

The main selling points for this doco are clips from Cary Grant's own home movies and excerpts from his unpublished memoir. But the home movies are are unremarkable at best, dull at worst. And the memoir extracts seem more like Grant's attempts to conceal, rather than reveal himself. The documentary accepts at face value what Grant says about his various marriages, while never even addressing all the indications that Grant was gay - not the plain fact that he shared a house and his life with Randolph Scott for 12 years, nor the revelations in Orry-Kelly's unpublished memoir about Grant's gay relationships in his New York years. At the same time this film attempt to analyse Grant's screen persona through the prism of the actor's private life - incomplete and questionable though the picture they've presented is. It's all highly dubious, and does no justice to either the actor or the man.

Becoming Cary Grant (2017)*** (out of 4)This here is like many recent documentaries where the subject themselves tells their story. The subject here is the one and only Cary Grant who we hear from interview clips as well as actor speaking from an unreleased autobiography.If you're familiar with the life of Grant then I seriously doubt that you're going to learn anything new here. We start off hearing about his LSD trips later in life and then we bounce back to his troubled childhood, which includes losing his mother to mental illness and then reaching out to her decades later. We cover his move to Hollywood, his rise to stardom as well as various roles throughout his career.Other documentaries have covered this stories several times before, which is why I say there's really not too much new stuff here. What new stuff there is includes some home movies that Grant filmed, which are quite interesting and towards the end there's an interview with his last girlfriend as well as his daughter. Truth be told, I would have preferred more to do with these two ladies as I'm sure they had some great stories to share.As it is, BECOMING CARY GRANT does a nice job for those unfamiliar with the life of the actor but at the same time I wasn't really bowled over by the structure of the film. I think some of the visuals go a bit too far as the story itself is strong enough to hold the viewer's attention. Still, fans of Grant will want to check this out.

The Cary Grant/Archibald Leach story is a treasure trove almost impossible to fail at. In fact it's such a compelling story that despite the failings of the director one does stay through to the end watching this tale. And personally I don't have a problem with missing bits of the story like other reviewers do or with the somber tone of the story. The somber tone, is an integral part of Cary's life, and as long as the director tells the story I think he does have the right to omit parts that don't fit into the story he wishes to tell.On the other hand I did find his pretentiousness very annoying. Having such a wonderful source material the director Mark Kidel had to show how he entered Cary Grant's mind and deciphered his innermost secrets. So he keeps on showing us scenes from Grant's therapeutic sessions with LSD pretending he knows what Grant saw there. It's groundless, pretentious and completely unnecessary for the story itself. But it's being repeated over and over again, and I found it to be detrimental to the movie