The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
‘Wormwood’ — obsession, paranoia and CIA cover-up
‘Fox of War’ documentary filmmaker returns with ‘Wormwood’ on Netflix
Errol Morris has long been intrigued by the truth that lives in the shadows, those dim spaces between what can be known and what remains just out of sight, and in “Wormwood,” the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker found a mystery that’s as fascinating as both Morris and the man who tells it.
“Wormwood” tackles the question of what happened to Frank Olson, an Army scientist who plunged out the window of a New York City hotel room in 1953, a suicide or accident, his family was told by the government, only to have the CIA admit two decades later that he’d been dosed with LSD. He was part of the military’s secret MK-Ultra program, which raised more questions.
Morris tells the story through interviews with Eric Olson, the dead man’s son, who’s dedicated his life to the mystery of what happened to his father: Did he jump? Fall? Or was it something more sinister? Over the film’s four hours — divided into six episodes for simultaneous Netflix release on Dec. 15 — the film flows from conversations with Olson, interviews with others involved, archival footage and dramatic re-enactments of the CIA documents, with actor Peter Sarsgaard as Frank Olson, a deep dive into conspiracy, paranoia and obsession.
“My work all has a kind of, I like to call them, metaphysical detective stories,” Morris says recently in an interview at Netflix’s L.A. headquarters. “This certainly fits in with a lot of what I’ve done in the past.”
Those past films include such documentaries as “The Thin Blue Line,” “A Brief History of Time” and “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” which won the 2003 Oscar for best documentary feature. While their stories varied —a man convicted of murder, the origins of the universe, and a Vietnam-era defense secretary’s look at modern warfare — they share a quest for the truth.
Morris says he and Netflix, which produced the film, initially talked about doing a different film about the MK-Ultra program, the CIA’s mind control experiments on subjects who wer eunaware they were part of the tests, and when that one fell through he shifted to the story of Frank Olson.
“It’s a story at its heart of government lying,” Morris says, “something that perhaps we are familiar with today, and the extent that the government will go to cover up their lies.”
Eric Olson was his point of entry to the story, Morris says.
“For many, many, many reasons,” he says. “His obsession with the circumstances of his father’s death. The fact that he was a detective trying to figure out a colossally complex story, a story that it turns out the government did its very best to cover up. Struggling against, I would say, a formidable adversary.
“It may be a story set back in 1953, an Army scientist goes out the window at the Statler Hotel in New York City, but it’s a story that is, I think, very, very modern, and very familiar to us,” Morris says.
Eric Olson was a child when his father died and grew up believing that the story of his death didn’t ring true. In the early 1970s, as Congress investigated potentially illegal activities by the CIA, the agency acknowledged more of what had happened to Frank Olson — the secret drug testing — and gave the family a settlement, but neither then or since did the government admit what Eric Olson came to believe: His father was murdered to keep him quiet about illegal government projects.
Morris says that quest for the truth came with a cost to the life Eric Olson might otherwise have lived.
“Certainly Eric does talk about that: Is it worth it?” he says. “It’s not exactly what I would call a quixotic pursuit, but it’s a pursuit that has very uncertain returns.”
Morris says he’s got another film project in the early stages of development, and two books on the way, including one titled “Murderers I Have Known,” which includes his past interviews with such serial killers as Ed Kemper, featured recently in the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” and Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
But he’s also not done with the story of “Wormwood,” he says.The film, or series, depending on how you watch it, ends with a few unresolved threads, and that tantalizing prospect dangled in an interview with famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that more of the truth is out there, hidden deep inside the government files.
“Do I think there’ll be an ultimate answer to the Olson mystery? I do, actually,” Morris says. “Eric and Sy and myself are not done with this.”
“My work all has a kind of, I like to call them, metaphysical detective stories. …This certainly fits in with a lot of what I’ve done in the past.” — Errol Morris, documentary film director