Conclusions is both the perfect title and false advertising, as Boorman himself admits (and is clearly deeply amused by) towards the end. It's decades of decaying and haphazardly sketched thoughts whirring within a brain whose body has long since failed it. You sit alongside Boorman as he reminisces and mourns, gets a little weepy (though he doesn't want to show it) and repeats himself (but you don't really mind). Then he brings out his poetry about trees, and he's talking fervently (religiously, even) about the beauty of water. Before he can completely lose you, he simmers back to a softer temperature to ponder the infinity he imminently faces. It's wonderfully intimate, and his wry wit and measured language work wonders for this unencumbered and formless self-retrospective audit of his life.

There are two sides to this. As a documenter who spent decades at the technological and artistic cutting edge of film, he is the best-case scenario—deeply observant. The book is packed with wonderfully specific anecdotes and experiences. My favourites are the deeply contrasting stories of Akira Kurosawa describing the impossibility of directing Toshiro Mifune ('You can only aim him like a missile!') and the tender way Boorman laments the way his work pulled him away from his family, a direct parallel between his father's failings and his own. He offers his full range in these short, scattered pages. A people watcher and a lover, who has watched so many people, and so much love, live and die before him.

I love it when he gets going about his work. Boorman gives no pride of place. The canonized films get as many (usually less!) pages as his niche BBC TV films (which he explicitly calls the most pleasurable to make). The Emerald Forest comes up more than Excalibur by quite a bit! It's his show, and his interest in his works is almost exclusively in the people, places and experiences that forged them. He'll mourn the failure of Exorcist II, offer bemusement at the cult classic status of Zardoz, and gladly discuss his right place right time innovations of Deliverance and Point Blank, but it's all an afterthought. Far more impactful are his words for the cinematographers that guided them. For John Hurt's perpetual drunkness.

In the final third, he turns (even more) introspective. Maybe he'd bristle up at the term, but it's spiritual, especially regarding water. Pontifications on the significance of life's pleasures. Poems, one for every tree in his garden. Sorrowful odes to all of his children, to his dead friends. Movies have made his life, they have ruined his life. He's loved his family, he's lost his family. He wishes to face oblivion head-on but feels he's not up to the task. The fact that this was (I assume) written in miniature spurts over many years means a new paragraph or sub-chapter will blossom with sudden pain or passion.

We all have one of these in us—an incoherent, quiet, and sloppy exorcism of the soul. Words on a page, entirely for and about one's self.

Conclusions

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