The cult stage magician – who may or may not have been faking a heart condition – proves an evasive subject in this tiresome film
For 91 tiring minutes, director Ben Berman sort of tells a story that is sort of interesting but maybe not really, padding the film with selfie footage of his own chaotic production problems. It is about the veteran Vegas comedian-slash-magician Johnathan Szeles, AKA the Amazing Johnathan, who once had a cult following for his gonzo act – like appearing to eat his own eyeball. In 2014, he announced he had a year to live due to a heart condition, before performing some sold-out farewell shows. He remains alive. Was he faking? Is this an ongoing professional illusion, or could he die at any moment?
To Berman’s understandable dismay, Szeles has apparently invited a number of other documentary crews to cover his twilit existence and the bleary, secretive Szeles does appear to be complicit in an entirely spurious claim, appearing on the web, that one of these documentary teams is associated with Simon Chinn, Oscar-winning
British producer of Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man. Berman interrupts the story of the Amazing Johnathan to tell us a bit – but not nearly enough – about his late mother, to whom he was very close, whom he videoed quite a bit in her last illness, and who may be psychologically bound up with his need to make films and with the idea of death itself. Perhaps he should have made a documentary about her.