Review By: Aaron Cutler
AaronCutler@TheCinemaSource.com

“Son, not only is it sick, it’s abnormal,” the artist Robert Wilson’s father told him upon seeing his first production, and I found myself wanting to agree or disagree with the man but unable to do either. Absolute Wilson, the new documentary on the artist in which this anecdote is shared, could more appropriately be called “Diluted Wilson”; in its cursory surface sketch of the artist’s life and career, it resembles a children’s picture book where somebody forgot to add the colors. I am perfectly willing to accept the film’s position that Wilson is one of the most important theatrical minds of the twentieth century; however, I am not willing to accept that works as strange and unsettling as his could have come out of as well-adjusted a mind as the film wants us to believe he possesses. The film seems to elide a great chunk of dementia, and as a result Wilson stays infinitely less interesting than its central subject’s art.

But who is Robert Wilson? He was born in Waco, Texas in 1941, and at the age of twenty-two came out to his religious father and moved to New York to study art at Pratt. After a brief mental breakdown, he founded an experimental dance troupe called The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, named after a dancer that he knew as a child, and began to mount experimental theater pieces which he has continued to do in the thirty-plus years since. Some of these include Deafman Glance, a seven-hour “silent opera” starring a deaf-mute African-American child who Wilson adopted; The Black Rider, a Faust-like narrative with narration by William S. Burroughs and lyrics by Tom Waits; and Einstein on the Beach, a seminal 1976 work created in collaboration with composer Philip Glass.

Wilson is still working, sleeping two to three hours a night and planning production sketches or transcontinental flights by day; much of his life is narrated to us by Wilson himself, who cheerfully addresses the camera. Celebrities such as Waits, David Byrne and the late Susan Sontag also pop up periodically to attest to his genius.

While we watch the film, however, certain things strike us as strange. For example, of his stay in the mental hospital he laughingly says, “I was struck by the aesthetic,” and describes the place’s look for a few sentences before we move on to another episode. Also consider the artist’s 1972 arrest in Iran for possession of hashish, a fascinating incident that merits only a few minutes before the biographical ball keeps bouncing.

This superficial approach to Wilson’s life also robs us of knowing much about his work, as we are shown multiple images from Wilson’s pieces of theater but never told much about them; there is never even a discussion raised as to how categorize them. Are they all operas? Do they have singing? What are some of them about? Does ...