Framing John Delorean is a documentary that strives to be simultaneously the first definitive movie about the titular car icon with recreations starring Alec Baldwin and Morena Baccarin, a documentary about the icon and the man with a dash of true crime. I considered seeing it in the theater, but the summary made it sound like it could be a mess with the mixing of genres so I added it to my queue.
I originally saw it over a year ago with my mom once it became available for home viewing on DVD, which is the ideal way to watch Framing John Delorean because the deleted scenes are essential to understanding Delorean. You can just watch the feature streaming on Hulu. Neither of us knew much about Delorean before the documentary nor are we knowledgeable about cars, but we found it incredibly entertaining nevertheless.
Framing John Delorean definitely roots for Delorean, and it affects how they present him. They also are really fascinated with the fact that no one has successfully made a movie of him in spite of so many proposals floating around while he was alive. You can hear the silent “until now” throughout the film. As a child of Unsolved Mysteries, I did not mind the above and beyond approach to the recreations or dramatizations of scenes from Delorean’s life that there was no archival footage of, but a common complaint about the film is that actors pontificating about their thoughts on the character was annoying. Instead of a narrator, you are getting famous people to talk about the guy. Most of the talking heads are either in the movie business, personally knew Delorean or were journalists. If they cut out the wannabe Delorean filmmakers, it probably would have focused the story more, but it did not annoy me.
Framing John Delorean would have been a better film if the filmmakers did not sympathize with Delorean so much. I may not know Delorean, but I am intimately familiar with how to tell the difference between a person who made a mistake and someone who could be a sociopath. The film cherry picks around Delorean’s history beginning with his success then ending with his failures, which include two shady and plausibly illegal schemes instead of beginning with his childhood scams! The film acts as if he was born a GM engineer, but the filmmakers did interview his family who told stories that suggest he was always a cad. I am not saying that his family judged him, but sometimes when a person tells a story, they do not always realize the gravity and implication of that story when outsiders hear it.
Framing John Delorean wanted a film about a man that would not fit into the square peg world of GM, which did not appreciate his flair and innovation. I love to eat up stories about the genius that no one listens to and gets punished for excellence, but was GM wrong? Yes, he was successful with the Pontiac GTO, was excellent at anticipating trends and responding to them, but his lifestyle eventually led to his downfall. They were right. He was not as serious a businessman as he was absorbed in creating a world that fulfilled his image of himself, which led to his various money schemes. Just because Delorean wanted Baldwin to play himself does not mean that anyone understood who should be cast as him.
Framing John Delorean does not see Delorean as the nerd, skinny, insecure kid who did not have a lot, finally had a taste of real success and access to real money, power and respect so he could have the resources to reinvent himself into the person whom he always wanted to be. I am old enough to remember when Baldwin was synonymous with peak hotness and cinematic excellence, not Trump impressions, talk and game shows, which I respect his versatility and being humble enough of a showbiz guy to keep food on the table, but it is objectively a more pedestrian rung on the entertainment ladder. Respect! Look at old photos of Delorean before success. He was never Baldwin and looked as if he belonged at GM. He wanted to be young Baldwin. He started working out, tanning, getting hot chicks, plastic surgery, etc. He wanted more than just money, which he could have gotten at GM. He wanted to be a big man who could do anything, anywhere, anytime, which is why his unscrupulous use of corporate funds makes sense. The work funded the lifestyle, but the work was not the point. He wanted to look rich with multiple properties, an international lifestyle, and at some point, the work came second so everything fell apart. You cannot cheat everyone. GM was right not to trust his work product, not because he did not have good ideas, but he did not care about them as much as erasing his past self and becoming his image of perfection.
A main reason that the work fell apart was his betrayal of Bill Collins, the automotive engineer who just stopped short of calling himself the mother of the DMC Delorean and was Delorean’s righthand man in making Delorean’s ideas into a practical reality. If Delorean’s confidence rested in his ability, then it really rested in Collins. Collins interviews in Framing John Delorean suggest a sober, analytical, understated, mournful nerd type. He is the opposite of Delorean. Even at eighty-seven, Collins does not miss a step. He is the kind of guy with a perfect memory regardless of what he says as he shows that he keeps everything perfectly organized and preserved. If he says that he does not remember, he is probably being discreet. In an interview that appears in the deleted scenes, probably because Collins is the first person to detect that Delorean is up to financial shenanigans, Collins was worried that Delorean was going to kill him and make it look like a suicide! Collins is not a man that seems paranoid, hysterical or the creative type to imagine phantoms in the shadows. I believe him and am annoyed that the filmmakers did not dig deeper to find out why he thought Delorean would do that to him. In other deleted scenes, we discover that Delorean tried to frame a journalist, Hillel Levin, as a drug dealer after Levin wrote an unfavorable article.
Framing John Delorean should have taken the approach of a true crime documentary and included every sketchy thing that he did. The documentary would be more focused and riveting. When depicting one of his illegal schemes, it neglected to ask why the government did not try to get Delorean on money laundering charges. I do not understand how the filmmakers could still view Delorean with admiration and missed a clear, versatile pattern of malfeasance, which they deliberately kept out of the main story, when they had all the information. The car can still be cool even if the man behind it may be evil.
Framing John Delorean was a great primer on learning about the car industry, Delorean and his effect in the media and the world, but the filmmakers obscuring his modus operandi makes it a slighter film as opposed to the definitive and only work that they hoped it would be. Watch it with a Lot’s wife size amount of salt.
