The Rise of the Butt-Numbingly Long Documentary

I spent Monday night at the Venice Film Festival in preparation. In some ways, it felt like I was getting ready to run a half-marathon. I had to make sure I ate enough carbs, was amply hydrated, and had planned out bathroom breaks. In other ways, it felt like I was planning to take an international flight. I went for a little walk, made sure I got enough fresh air and sunshine beforehand, because I was about to strap in for what has become an increasingly common film-festival experience. It was time to see an insanely long documentary — in this case, Alex Gibney’s four-hour film about Elon Musk, called simply Musk. (The one-word title is the only brief thing about it.)

The funny thing is, by the standards of this year’s Venice, Musk might as well have been an 88-minute studio comedy. This year, it’s dwarfed in the lineup by the nearly six-hour My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile, Julia Loktev’s sequel to her acclaimed 2024 documentary about anti-Putin journalists in Russia, which itself was five and a half hours long. Most imposing of all is Luca Guadagnino’s Joie de Vivre, a documentary about Bernardo Bertolucci that clocks in at a colossal seven hours long. Mamma mia!

Of course, long documentaries have been with us for decades. The Sorrow and the Pity runs over four hours; Shoah clocks in at over nine. ESPN’s nearly eight-hour miniseries O.J.: Made in America won the Oscar for Documentary Feature and prompted the Academy to change its rules so nothing like that could ever happen again. What feels new is not the scale but the frequency. A megalong doc used to be a rare beast; now, every prestige-festival lineup feels like it needs to include a few gargantuans.

Joie de Vivre didn’t premiere until Tuesday, relatively late in the festival; as of this moment, my illustrious colleague Bilge Ebiri is the only person I know who’s seen it. But Musk and My Undesirable Friends present two different use cases for the megalong documentary: comprehensiveness and immersion.

In the case of Musk, that long run time was not the original plan. “We intended to make a shorter film,” Gibney said at the film’s Venice press conference. Like The Brutalist, Musk was presented at Venice with a ten-minute intermission (complete with countdown clock), and its first half feels like a vestige of the project Gibney imagined at the start: an exploration of how Musk went from one of countless entrepreneurs kicking around San Francisco in the new millennium to the richest man in the world. The answer, it turns out, is a fable about the power of storytelling meeting the irrationality of the market. If you’re deep into the Musk mythos, there may not be much that is especially new, but Gibney sees value in putting it all in one place. We live in “a bewildering world of inputs,” he said. “A lot of incidents happen. There’s so many trees that sometimes it’s useful to stitch together a narrative that shows the forest.”

Musk covers a lot of ground, and while the film is often lively, it’s hard not to ask yourself what little snips you might have made. Especially when it comes to the film’s most controversial element: a CGI recreation of Musk (complete with an unsettlingly large head) who speaks the man’s actual words in a voice created by AI. At the press conference, Gibney called the use of AI “intentionally ironic,” using the garish technology to mirror Musk’s own garish sensibilities. This is matched by fantasy sequences imagining Musk as a character in a first-person video game, which many critics here call — and this is a technical term — pretty annoying.

Still, by most accounts, Musk’s four hours pass rather quickly. Just not as quickly as I assumed — having been uninformed about the intermission, when the house lights came up halfway through, I thought, Wow, those four hours flew by! Thankfully, the bathroom lines at Venice intermissions are not too long, as 70 percent of the audience uses the opportunity to duck out and have a smoke.

It’s easier to keep track of time during My Undesirable Friends, since, like its predecessor, it is divided into five parts. As my colleague Alison Willmore noted about the first film, the extended run time places the audience in slowly boiling water alongside the subjects as Putin’s noose tightens. The journalists spend much of the first film wondering whether they should stay and fight back through their work or flee for their own safety. The sequel picks up after the reporters have finally fled, scattering across the globe: Istanbul, Israel, Georgia, Austria, Latvia. That gives it a more epic feeling than the first film. As Loktev notes, the first film takes place over four months, the second over four years. But it still has an essential momentum that belies the nearly six-hour run time.

Instead, the viewing difficulties came not from time but from space — Venice programmed a lot of the screenings in a tiny theater, where everyone’s sight lines for the subtitles were blocked by the heads of those in front of them. The result was a strange game of human Tetris as people moved seats for better views, thus creating new problems for those behind them. I was left cursing anyone who was over six feet tall or had a particularly voluminous hairstyle. But we got through it!

Why are there so many of these ultralong docs? I suspect it has something to do with the theatrical market for documentary films drying up. With so many of these films destined to wind up on streaming services rather than art houses, there’s little incentive for directors to whittle down their work to the two-hour mark. Musk will stream on HBO Max, while My Undesirable Friends will live on Mubi, where it will become essentially one 11-hour season of TV.

As much as journalists at Venice may complain about making space in their schedules for these huge documentaries, a film festival may actually be the ideal venue to experience projects like these. Cut off from daily responsibilities, one needs no excuse for spending five hours watching a single film. And besides, when they’re good, they’re far from the longest thing you’ll see while you’re here. This morning, one friend recalled watching an execrable drama that felt about four hours long. When he checked his watch at the end, he discovered it had only been 90 minutes.