NY Opening: THE IMPOSTER Untangles a Post-Modern Mystery

Bart Layton's The Imposter opens on Friday, July 13, in New York before expanding to other cities in the U.S. in the coming weeks. It's the tale of a missing child, a bereaved family, and a mysterious stranger.

I saw the film at SXSW in March. Quoting from my review, here's the set up:

In 1994, a 13-year-old boy named Nicholas Barclay disappears without a trace in San Antonio, Texas. It's a tragedy, especially as the months and years pass without any resolution to the case. His family grieves for him, suspecting, or even assuming, that he's dead, but lacking the closure that would come with the discovery of a body.

Three years and a few months later, authorities in Spain receive an anonymous phone call from someone claiming to have found a lost child. The police investigate, whereupon an interview subject is presented on camera, a gentleman who says that he was in desperate circumstances at the time, and pretended to be younger than he was in order to secure a safe place to stay. As the authorities probe further into his case, he hits upon a nefarious idea: He will pretend to be an American teenager who was reported missing years before. And it just happens to be Nicholas Barclay that he will impersonate.

At this point of the film, no personal background has been provided on the gentleman other than his age (23) at the time, but he speaks in a very personable, apparently sincere manner about his decision to hijack someone else's identity, without any deep thought about the ramifications of his deception, either to himself or, especially, to the family of the missing child.

Nicholas' family is thunderstruck. His sister, realizing that her mother could not handle traveling to Spain to confirm the identity of the man claiming to be Nicholas, makes the trip. Even though there are a number of marked physical differences -- for one thing, Nicholas had blue eyes, while the gentleman has brown eyes -- Nicholas' sister states firmly that the stranger is, actually, the missing Nicholas. U.S. officials dutifully go along, issue the man a new passport in Nicholas' name, and allow him to return to Texas with Nicholas' sister.

ScreenAnarchy's Jason Gorber saw the film the following month at HotDocs and picked up the story from there in his review:

The works deftly shifts its tone throughout, the filmmakers wisely leaving enough space within the structure to allow an audience to draw competing conclusions multiple times throughout the film. As it ends, we're left with a kind of anti-catharsis, knowing certain things about the superficial facts of the case, but next to nothing regarding the core motivations for the actors of the story, nor which tales to believe. Even the private investigator, digging another empty hole, seems mildly preposterous yet ringing with a sense of truth, or at least truthiness.

The Imposter is a wonderfully engaging set of competing stories about a family, their son, and their brief acceptance of a man who proved to be a stranger to them. More than that, however, it's broadly a comment on the nature of documentary itself, the compromised role of investigation from a professional standpoint, be it the form of State department or FBI case work, or the interviews set on tape by the documentarians themselves.

The audience is treated to one of those rewind-the-tape effects early on, a Bergman-esque nod to the presence of technical mechanism being shaped by the hands of the artists. Once we've spent our time in this strange world, the soothing accent of our gap-toothed narrator intertwined with the southern drawl of our shell shocked, tragicomic family, it impossible not to define their roles in part the way we would with so-called "fictional' characters in film. This is no failure by the documentarians, instead its a sophisticated, non-invasive deconstruction of the normal means in which stories of this type get told.

There's nothing arrogant or overtly academic in what the makers of The Imposter accomplish - it's an aesthetically pleasing, conventionally paced work that's surely accessible to a wide audience. It will, perhaps, shatter many misconceptions as wider audiences view the film, bringing to it their own preconceptions and beliefs that shape their own understandings of what it means to document a story that actually transpired.

Though Jason and I differ in our conclusions on the film -- see the individual reviews for details, please! -- we agree that it's very much worth seeking out.