Turn Every Page suffers from the same problem plenty of documentaries have: its subjects are so fascinating, and their text so rich, that a two-hour runtime feels more like a Wikipedia greatest hits session than a truly insightful product.
On one hand, you’ve got Robert Caro, widely considered one of the most insightful commentators and historians on modern American power, author of 1974’s The Power Broker and his soon-to-be five-volume, decades-long exhaustive series on Lyndon Johnson.
On the other, you’ve got Robert Gottlieb, among the greatest editors in the history of literature. Apart from the long-standing, 50-plus year relationship editing Caro’s works, he’s edited works from little-known authors such as John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Charles Portis, Michael Crichton, Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan. Oh, and in his spare time, he edited The New Yorker and served on the Boards of both the New York City Ballet and the Miami City Ballet.
Both these characters are fascinating, and both probably deserve feature-length documentaries devoted entirely to their individual bodies of work. Turn Every Page tries to focus on both somewhat equally, and mostly separately, and that’s it’s biggest problem. The film’s director, Lizzie Gottlieb (Bob Gottlieb’s daughter) openly acknowledges her subjects’ hesitancy to dive deeply into their editing relationship, but instead of leaning into that friction, she obliges to separate the two until the very last, and frustratingly short, scene.
For the rest of the review, head over to the Telegraph’s site.
