Wormwood Review: Errol Morris Returns to the World of The Thin Blue Line

Recent true-crime television miniseries like The Jinx,Making a Murderer, and Serial (O.K., that wasn’t television—but inconsistencies are what make these stories fascinating, right?) all owe something of a debt to Errol Morris’s groundbreaking 1988 film The Thin Blue Line. That moody, arresting independent doc about a wrongfully imprisoned man had real-world implications: it got someone out of jail.

But Morris’s film wasn’t just investigative journalism. It was juicy. It had the trappings of a thriller and was marketed as one, becoming one of Miramax’s early hits. It also featured cinematic re-enactments—which may feel natural by now, but back then had all sorts of media purists up in arms about its ethics. (Indeed, those scenes prevented the film from being considered for an Academy Award.)

This is all to say that Morris, now an Oscar-winner and inventor nearing his 70th birthday, is hardly resting on his laurels. His films include deep dives with historic individuals (Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Hawking), fantasias on human accomplishment (Fast, Cheap, Out of Control) and a personal favorite: a study of seemingly intelligent people unable to accept obvious truths (Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.).

Wormwood, a six-part event debuting on Netflix, is a return to “true crime” for Morris, but with a number of twists. Though squeezing in just under the wire, it’s one of the most original things you’ll see all year.

This is, at times, a fairly straightforward documentary, at least by Morris’ standards. His subject is Eric Olson, a sixty-something year-old man who has spent most of his life trying to get the bottom of his father’s mysterious death. In 1953, Dr. Frank Olson, a specialist in studying bacteria who worked at an Army base in Maryland, plummeted from a New York City hotel room. Maybe he fell; maybe he jumped. It was always vague to young Eric.

In the mid 1970s, however, stories began to leak about the CIA’s secret MKUltra project. If you’ve paid any attention to Stephen King or The X-Files, you know that MKUltra’s game was mind control and experimentation with LSD on unsuspecting people. Dr. Olson, so Seymour Hershreported in the New York Times, was likely dosed against his knowledge, then began to freak out—and, finally, flung himself out the window.

The government apologized to the Olson family in 1976 (and slipped them some cash)—but that’s just when son Eric, gifted with a brilliant mind, began to suspect something else.

Morris doesn’t just tease Eric’s story out in words; he also incorporates images. Whereas the reenactments in The Thin Blue Line were slowly choreographed moves set to music, Wormwood features what can only be called a film within a film. In fact, if you were to string along just the scenes that include familiar faces like Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Blake Nelson, Bob Balaban and others, you’d have more than enough material for another feature.

“The purpose of documentary. . . is not just to give us reality on a plate, but to make us think about what reality is,” Morris said in an interview with Slate last year. And indeed, the scene work augments the narrative nicely. It all has the required effect: an eerie, something-is-happening-here-but-you-don’t-know-what-it-is-do-you-Mr.-Jones vibe, one that evokes mid-century American cold war paranoia. It creates a mood somewhere between Twin Peaks: The Return and Don DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld, but its contents also seem very plausible. In fact, the movie argues that what we see in these recreation is all actually true.

While he doesn’t lean on it too much, there is some “well, that’s how it might have happened, but how about like this?” at play in Wormwood. (Pull this lever too many times, and you risk evoking the ending of Clue.) But overall, the see-saw between documentary and fictionalized narrative—something that can easily seem cheap—works really well here. Moreover, each 45-minute episodes takes a bit of a left turn from the one that precedes it; I’ve been deliberately good about keeping what this movie is really about to a minimum.

While it’s hard to turn away from Wormwood, the miniseries is also incredibly sad. Eric Olson may have been eager for Errol Morris to publicize his quest for the Truth, but by the end of the journey, he may have misgivings on how he comes across in the film. He is a great scholar, and, as such, is cursed with the self-awareness to know when his actions are self-destructive. His decades-long obsession to tilt at the mightiest American windmill of all—the CIA—ultimately spiked any chance at real relationships in his life.

Wormwood is a brilliant title for a story about his quest. The substance’s hallucinatory properties (it’s what’s in absinthe) make for a logical MKUltra connection—but it’s also an ingredient in vermouth. And Olson’s mother dealt with her husband’s death by drinking, specifically the martinis her Army handler (and perhaps grand conspirators) poured for her every evening. Young Eric’s “recollection” of his mother’s nightly martini is one of Morris’ more striking images. But wormwood is a term that also invokes bitterness, and is mentioned in two notably gloomy texts: Hamlet and The Book of Revelation. Wormwood is addictive—but it does leave an aftertaste.

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