Protagonist: The Best Documentary You’ve Never Heard Of

Before we left on our wintery cabin honeymoon, we Netflixed some movies to bring with us. My choice was a documentary I had never heard of, but one that the Netflix supercomputer was convinced I would like.

It was called Protagonist - a documentary in which four totally unrelated men tell their life stories according to the Euripidian Greek dramatic structure. Oh, and the whole thing is just four simple interviews intertwined with marionette puppets acting out the scenes. Bored and weirded out yet?

Don’t be. Even though Ben and I spent about the first five minutes of the film laughing at the puppets and the seeming randomness of the whole production, by the end, we were both deeply emotionally affected.

“I know this sounds lame,” Ben said after a minute of silence, “but I was truly touched by that.”

The film follows four men - a bank robber, a terrorist, an “ex-gay” preacher, and a martial artist. Each one takes turns telling the story of how they were formed as men - rough childhoods, strange epiphanies that lead to extremist behavior, and finally the realization that they have been largely brainwashed in their attempts to find mentors or escape their depression.

Again, I know this doesn’t sound interesting or moving, but what truly made the documentary was 1) how subtlety the common themes show themselves and 2) how self-aware, honest, and candid the four men are. All four of them are stellar storytellers and that simple fact paired with the surprisingly moving marionette scenes (I’m serious) make for two hours of film that I wished wouldn’t end.

Director Jessia Wu is also responsible for a few episodes of West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy, along with another documentary called In the Realms of the Unreal - and you can bet that the latter just landed on the top of my Netflix queue.