‘The Amazing Johnathan Documentary’ On Hulu Contains No Straight Answers, Only More Tricks

Most documentaries tell you everything you need to know in the first minute.

A mission statement. A singular quote from the documentary subject that makes the movie worth watching, and obviously worth making. Or a moment, or montage of moments, that hooks you in as a viewer, wanting to know what in the heck is even happening.

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary on Hulu, directed by Ben Berman, opens with this onscreen proclamation:

What are “available facts,” though, but what we know, when we know it. In the hands of a more passive viewer or filmmaker, this amounts to telling us that we see what we want to see. And when the camera focuses on a mega-successful comedy magician, who has built a career on illusions, deceptions and pranks, can we even trust what we see onscreen?

That’s a question Berman asks himself.

Although the more facts you make available to yourself, the more you’ll distrust Berman, too.

After all, we’ve already seen one documentary about Johnathan Szeles this year: Always Amazing, directed by stand-up comedian Steve Byrne, and released for free on YouTube via All Things Comedy.

Berman’s doc sets Byrne up as an overhyped rival who refuses to cooperate. Having watched both docs, I not only can confirm that they were never competing to tell the same story, but also that whatever rivalry emerged only did so as a result of The Amazing Johnathan’s manipulation, with or without the cooperation of both documentary crews.

Szeles, who will turn 61 on Sept. 9, announced in 2014 that he’d been diagnosed with a year left to live. That he has even survived this long certainly would have piqued interest from many a filmmaker. Launching a comeback tour in 2017 after three years away from headlining Las Vegas attracted multiple documentary suitors.

What Berman does with that information propels his doc off on tangents and into existential angst, much like how Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Adaptation winds up looking nothing like a film version of “The Orchid Thief.”

Berman’s doc opens on a sentimental note, as we see Szeles without his wig, wandering into the pool behind his Vegas home, then attending a magic convention where old-timers including “Mr. Electric” encourage him to get back onstage. Moments later, however, we’re back in Szeles’s bedroom, watching him smoke speed from a pipe. “It’s actually not speed, it’s meth,” says his wife, Anastasia Synn. “If you had told me on your first date that you did meth like vitamins, I would’ve walked. Then I fell in love with him, and now I’m fucked!”

How did this guy make it to 57, much less 60, smoking meth, popping pills and given a terminal diagnosis due to cardiomyopathy?

We see Synn keep him medicated, and he reveals at a couple of points that stem cell injections have worked wonders.

But we never talk to a doctor, any doctor, about his medical condition.

Instead, we follow him to Massachusetts and California on his 2017 comeback tour, then stop following him for a while so Berman can ask his friends and family for advice, all on camera.

As the narrative threatens to degenerate into chaotic self-absorption and become a documentary about trying to make documentaries in the age of peak content, voila, just like another magic trick, we arrive at a happy ending.

After the movie wrapped, of course, the available facts tell us that Berman (whose previous directing credits included several TV comedies like Lady Dynamite and Comedy Bang! Bang!) never had to worry, did he. His film, this doc, went to Sundance and emerged with a reported $2 million from Hulu.

If any of us were to ask Berman for the truth, however, it’d probably just play out exactly as it did for him when he first confronted The Amazing Johnathan backstage after a show.

“Give me a straight answer.”

“Why are you even asking me that? Don’t you know what the answer to that is?”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch The Amazing Johnathan Documentary on Hulu