An Honest Liar

Magic is a science that involves misdirection and misinformation, the subverting of an audience's expectation by sleight of hand or the manipulation of light through reflection and refraction. It is by definition a presentation of illusion as reality, of the impossible as the truth. Because human beings often act irrationally and believe wishfully, any expert practitioner might convince a portion of the population that he owns supernatural or at least extrasensory powers. Because people are gullible and desperate to believe, the potential for abuse of magic is tremendous.

James "The Amazing" Randi is the 86-year-old honest liar of the title of Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom's remarkable documentary, a highlight of 2014's Tribeca Film Festival and one of two Best U.S. Documentary Features at the 2014 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. He is an extraordinary magician and a debunker of purported psychics, faith healers and others who claim paranormal powers. He sees only one legitimate use for magic -- to entertain -- and he has for decades crusaded against those who hold themselves out as able to communicate with the dead or heal the sick through the laying on of hands. He is a fierce and articulate advocate for rational skepticism and scientific inquiry.

Randi performs tricks. And as a working magician, he won't tell you how they are done (and if he did you might be astounded by the simplicity with which most are accomplished) but he admits his deception. He is honest.

For decades, Randi has occupied a certain rung a few steps down from the top of the celebrity ladder. He was a fixture on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in the '70s and is an obvious predecessor to the politically informed magic duo of Penn & Teller, who occasionally featured him on their Showtime television series. He was the guy who designed Alice Cooper's stage beheadings.

If Randi were only an entertainer, his life might be worth a film. But he developed a parallel career as an investigator of so-called paranormal activity, writing dozens of books and publishing hundreds of magazine articles about the ways magic's techniques have been used to fleece and give false hope to the gullible. For nearly 60 years he has been offering up a cash reward to anyone who could demonstrate scientific evidence of paranormal activity. Dozens have tried. No one has ever collected.

For two-thirds of the movie, An Honest Liar is a highly entertaining account of Randi's professional progress, how he evolved from a mind-reading act and Houdini-esque escape artistry to a charming talk show guest. Various adventures and elaborate exploits are described in detail, including Randi's decades-long campaign against spoon-bending Uri Geller and televangelist Peter Popoff, a charlatan faith healer who was alerted to his supplicants' ailments by means of a radio transmitter.

Randi was also behind a hoax in which a young Venezuelan artist named Jose Alvarez claimed to be a conduit for a 2,000-year-old spirit named Carlos -- a parody of "channelers" like JZ Knight, who claims to be occasionally possessed by a 30,000-year-old spirit named Ramtha. Carlos enjoyed a sold-out tour of Australia, where he was greeted by a credulous media despite a press kit that consisted of invented stories in fictional U.S. magazines and newspapers. Not one journalist fact-checked the information, and even after Carlos was revealed as a hoax some still professed to believe in him.

But there's a final-act twist in An Honest Liar -- one that won't be revealed here -- that separates the film from the pack of sturdy entertainments and makes it a truly revelatory and touching endeavor. It's reminiscent of Orson Welles' free association on the art of deception, F Is for Fake (1973), though Weinstein and Measom (and Randi) are more straightforward storytellers than Welles ever was, and the personal, potent drama that emerges is both startling and humanizing.

MovieStyle on 04/17/2015