Potent Cocktail Of Drama And Documentary Explores A Mysterious Death: 'Wormwood' : NPR
Frank Olson
What is known for sure about  American military scientist Frank Olson  is that on November 28  1953  the bacteriologist and father of three plunged to  his  death from the thirteenth floor of the Statler hotel in New York City  not long after  he  was secretly drugged with LSD on the orders of  his  CIA superior. Whether  Olson  was pushed  or jumped  or was nudged into committing suicide remains unclear. But indeterminacy with a generous side of conspiracy is catnip to director Errol Morris  who has made either a 241-minute film or a six-part television series depending on where and how you plan to watch it  about the tragedy's long reach into  Olson 's family and America's secretive political culture.
 Olson 's death  and the murk surrounding its cause  cast a defining shadow over the life of his son Eric  whose endless quest to find out what happened that night has pre-empted all other endeavors. The blight spread around his family. His mother became an alcoholic with  the film implies  the active encouragement of one of her husband's colleagues. But Eric  now in his sixties  has arguably been completely derailed by the tragedy. He is the central focus of Wormwood  a hybrid blend of documentary and Cold War thriller that makes The B-Side  Morris's loving portrait of radical photographer Elsa Dorfman earlier this year  look almost straightforward.
Moving back and forth between the 1953 events and 1975  when a Rockefeller commission confirmed that an army scientist had been purposefully drugged with hallucinogens   Wormwood carries us from secret meetings at Deer Lake through the long tail of misery and obfuscation left by  Frank 's death  to Eric's pursuit of the truth all the way to the corridors of power.
In hushed and menacing re-enactments  Peter Sarsgaard  whose mild manner lends itself to all kinds of tonal nuance  charts the decline and fall of  Olson   a patriotic team player whose growing unease about his agency's secretive involvement in biological warfare overseas first worries his boss (a reptilian Tim Blake Nelson) and then moves him to seize the day and use his hapless employee as a guinea pig. By the time  Frank  arrives at the hotel flanked by ambiguously supportive colleagues  he's rapidly unraveling into a gibbering wreck.
Wormwood's breathless  hopped-up style harks back to Morris's 1988 The Thin Blue Line  which called into question a murder verdict and resulted in the release of a wrongly convicted suspect from Death Row. Here the noir markers are writ so large as to verge now and then on self-parody. Morris keeps returning the action to the hotel to act out different angles and competing versions of what happened to  Olson  that night. The hypothetical range between possible perps â  Frank 's boss  his friends  two wordless thugs in fedoras  a CIA allergist played by a sinister Bob Balaban â is narrow enough to make these scenes a touch repetitive if you're watching in one sitting. Certainly they underscore Morris's standing as a lifelong participant observer of American paranoia. For which  it must be said  there is undeniable fodder in the manner of Olsen's going  the secrecy surrounding his death  the ambivalent admissions the Rockefeller Commission along with a dwindling financial settlement that looks suspiciously like hush money to  Olson  and to Morris  and the merrily chuckling presence in old footage of two well-known knowns  Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
For all the formal beauty of the re-enactments  the most compelling scenes in Wormwood are the unembellished interviews that Morris â ordinarily an off-screen interlocutor with an appetite for the subtly leading question â is seen conducting across a table with Eric Olson  who waves his arms around with the befuddled intensity of a superannuated schoolboy as he tells his story. Articulate and charming  Eric is a talented collage artist who seems to have sacrificed career and significant relationships to his endless search for justice and truth  even after the case was officially closed and after he contacts investigative reporter Seymour Hersh  who first reported the drugging of  Olson  in The New York Times. Grandiose as always  Hersh insists that  he knows who murdered Frank Olson   but won't say for fear of compromising an anonymous source. We can't tell whether  he 's fibbing either.
A romantic view â and I wouldn't entirely put this past Morris â is that  Olson  is  like  his  interlocutor  an artist with a magnificent obsession that sustains  him  even when it's doomed to failure. But in Wormwood  he  emerges with enormous poignancy as a tragic figure  perpetually stuck in limbo like the father we see tumbling  over and over  to  his  fate.
What is known for sure about   [TGT] is that on November 28  1953  the bacteriologist and father of three plunged to   [TGT]   death from the thirteenth floor of the Statler hotel in New York City  not long after   [TGT]   was secretly drugged with LSD on the orders of   [TGT]   CIA superior. Whether   [TGT] was pushed  or jumped  or was nudged into committing suicide remains unclear. But indeterminacy with a generous side of conspiracy is catnip to director Errol Morris  who has made either a 241-minute film or a six-part television series depending on where and how you plan to watch it  about the tragedy's long reach into  Olson 's family and America's secretive political culture.
  [TGT]  's death  and the murk surrounding its cause  cast a defining shadow over the life of his son Eric  whose endless quest to find out what happened that night has pre-empted all other endeavors. The blight spread around his family. His mother became an alcoholic with  the film implies  the active encouragement of one of her husband's colleagues. But Eric  now in his sixties  has arguably been completely derailed by the tragedy. He is the central focus of Wormwood  a hybrid blend of documentary and Cold War thriller that makes The B-Side  Morris's loving portrait of radical photographer Elsa Dorfman earlier this year  look almost straightforward.
Moving back and forth between the 1953 events and 1975  when a Rockefeller commission confirmed that an army scientist had been purposefully drugged with hallucinogens   Wormwood carries us from secret meetings at Deer Lake through the long tail of misery and obfuscation left by  Frank 's death  to Eric's pursuit of the truth all the way to the corridors of power.
In hushed and menacing re-enactments  Peter Sarsgaard  whose mild manner lends itself to all kinds of tonal nuance  charts the decline and fall of  Olson   a patriotic team player whose growing unease about his agency's secretive involvement in biological warfare overseas first worries his boss (a reptilian Tim Blake Nelson) and then moves him to seize the day and use his hapless employee as a guinea pig. By the time  Frank  arrives at the hotel flanked by ambiguously supportive colleagues  he's rapidly unraveling into a gibbering wreck.
Wormwood's breathless  hopped-up style harks back to Morris's 1988 The Thin Blue Line  which called into question a murder verdict and resulted in the release of a wrongly convicted suspect from Death Row. Here the noir markers are writ so large as to verge now and then on self-parody. Morris keeps returning the action to the hotel to act out different angles and competing versions of what happened to  Olson  that night. The hypothetical range between possible perps â  Frank 's boss  his friends  two wordless thugs in fedoras  a CIA allergist played by a sinister Bob Balaban â is narrow enough to make these scenes a touch repetitive if you're watching in one sitting. Certainly they underscore Morris's standing as a lifelong participant observer of American paranoia. For which  it must be said  there is undeniable fodder in the manner of Olsen's going  the secrecy surrounding his death  the ambivalent admissions the Rockefeller Commission along with a dwindling financial settlement that looks suspiciously like hush money to  Olson  and to Morris  and the merrily chuckling presence in old footage of two well-known knowns  Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
For all the formal beauty of the re-enactments  the most compelling scenes in Wormwood are the unembellished interviews that Morris â ordinarily an off-screen interlocutor with an appetite for the subtly leading question â is seen conducting across a table with Eric Olson  who waves his arms around with the befuddled intensity of a superannuated schoolboy as he tells his story. Articulate and charming  Eric is a talented collage artist who seems to have sacrificed career and significant relationships to his endless search for justice and truth  even after the case was officially closed and after he contacts investigative reporter Seymour Hersh  who first reported the drugging of  Olson  in The New York Times. Grandiose as always  Hersh insists that  he knows who murdered  [TGT] but won't say for fear of compromising an anonymous source. We can't tell whether  he 's fibbing either.
A romantic view â and I wouldn't entirely put this past Morris â is that   [TGT] is  like   [TGT]   interlocutor  an artist with a magnificent obsession that sustains   [TGT]   even when it's doomed to failure. But in Wormwood  he  emerges with enormous poignancy as a tragic figure  perpetually stuck in limbo like the father we see tumbling  over and over  to  his  fate.