Captain's Prerogative

Last year, William Shatner released a documentary he directed called The Captains. In it, he conducts one-on-one interviews with all the other actors to have played the lead role of "the captain" in an incarnation of Star Trek: Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, and even Chris Pine. That sounded like catnip to a Star Trek fan like me, so I had to check it out.

Unsurprisingly, the film is as much about Shatner as it is about any of his subjects. His style of conducting an interview is to talk just as much as the other person, and large chunks of the film use the backgrounds of the other actors as a way of talking about his own background. But then, if it's a revelation to you that William Shatner can be kind of self-centered, then you probably haven't seen any Star Trek and wouldn't be interested in this documentary anyway.

What was a bit more revealing to me about Shatner is that this documentary exposed him as something of a mimic. Not an actual impersonator, but a sort of "mood ring" that changes according to the people around him. Yes, there is a certain Shatnerocity that never leaves the man. But as you watch him throughout the movie, cutting from one actor to the next, you see different behavior in each situation.

With Patrick Stewart, Shatner gets deeply introspective. Stewart has the most thoughtful and introspective things to say about his experience as a Star Trek captain, and so in turn, Shatner probes most deeply into his own character during their conversation. He speaks of how seeing the gravitas and authenticity Stewart brought to Jean-Luc Picard made him come to terms with his own experience as Kirk, from which he had long sought to distance himself. Essentially, Stewart "legitimized" Star Trek for Shatner. Stewart has his own interesting perspective to share, that he learned from the cast of his own show that it's possible to do serious, quality work and have fun at the same time; prior to Star Trek, he says, he thought of the two as more mutually exclusive.

Avery Brooks comes off as borderline crazy. Benjamin Sisko is arguably the most severe and composed of all the Star Trek captains, but Brooks is a flighty man who seems perpetually high on a cocktail of jazz piano and spirituality. His interview with Shatner takes place at a piano, and he responds to most of Shatner's questions with an improvisational spray of notes and an only-sometimes-related stream of consciousness beat poem. Shatner gets right into this odd groove, parroting and riffing back in some kind of strange Meisner exercise set to music.

Kate Mulgrew is the most playful of the interview subjects, and Shatner is in a playful mood before it even begins, staging to "meet" her by waiting in a cardboard box outside a theater in New York. The two do venture into deeper territory when they start contrasting male and female leaders. I'm not entirely sure, but it felt like it ventured into sexist territory... though the two were in full agreement with one another the whole time.

Shatner is introspective in another way with Scott Bakula. The two speak of Bakula's musical background, and get into the grind of working on a television series. Quantum Leap is as much a subject as Enterprise, a series in which Bakula appeared in almost every scene shot for five seasons. (He says in the interview that he had only five days off set in the entire five years of shooting.) The two both speak of how the television grind accelerated the disintegration of their marriages. They also get into some mutual admiration. Shatner seems most genuinely impressed with Bakula's skill as a performer out of all the captains, and Bakula for his part wishes that his Star Trek cast, talented though they were as individuals, could have gelled in the way that seemed to come through with the original cast.

Shatner transforms yet again when interviewing Chris Pine. It's the shortest interview of all, but Shatner channels his inner child, challenging the younger "Kirk" to an arm wrestling match.

Yet while the more illuminating moments in this documentary are there, the overall experience is ultimately lacking. This rather interesting idea would have been better realized in the hands of a third party who treated Shatner like just one more of the subjects. But with Shatner in command, the whole movie is less about these very different actors and more about how he reacts to them. He indulges in flights of fancy, including a five-minute section where he interviews Christopher Plummer. (The justification? Well, he was a "captain" -- a general, in fact -- in a Star Trek movie. But more, it was understudying for Plummer that gave Shatner his first big break early in his career, and Shatner just wanted an excuse to put his old friend on film.)

I think here and there in the film, you get glimpses of what could have been a truly interesting documentary that compared and contrasted different actors and their styles of acting. The result is probably still must-see viewing for any serious Star Trek fan. But it is still all less than the potential sum of its parts. I grade the movie a C+.