Fast-paced doc 'The Incomparable Rose Hartman' glosses over photographer's complexity - Los Angeles Times
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Review: Fast-paced doc ‘The Incomparable Rose Hartman’ glosses over photographer’s complexity

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When Bianca Jagger rode a white horse at Studio 54 in the ’70s, more than a handful of people took photographs. Rose Hartman’s celebrated shot, however, made Jagger look like something timeless and inevitable, private and magical. A goddess on a unicorn would have had trouble matching what Hartman captured.

But Otis Mass’ fast-paced documentary about this erstwhile, party-crashing camerawoman (and friend), “The Incomparable Rose Hartman,” doesn’t work nearly as hard to nail down its subject as Hartman herself would, even now at 80, to gain entree into a celeb-stuffed, fashionable shindig. Mass commits the lazy doc sin of over-interviewing — dozens of talking heads fly by in just the first few minutes — which blurs the portrait in a soup of repeated comments as you try to assess who knew her and who’s just pontificating.

What emerges is less a plea for recognizing this abrasive go-getter as a singular chronicler of New York’s social scene than a catty catalog of desperate-for-attention traits. Mass loves (a bit too much) their between-takes spats and moments at art functions when Hartman chastises partygoers for not looking at her work, all of which feel petty instead of revealing.

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The movie is most interesting when addressing how important belonging in the world she covers is to Hartman as her recording it, and there’s obviously a hard-bitten, self-obsessed personality to explore, but it’s lost in the surface-skim technique.

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‘The Incomparable Rose Hartman’

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 11 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica

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