A documentary feature about onion rings may not seem like a very enticing idea, not even if they're supposedly the best onion rings in the world. Maybe if the guy who made them was scintillating or funny or damaged or weird or otherwise in some way interesting. But Larry Lang, the titular star of "The Ringmaster," is incredibly shy and mostly uncommunicative.
It's like trying to a movie about the elementary school janitor who smiles at the kids but never talks to anyone.
Yet Zachary Capp was determined to do so, so good are Larry's Bad Onion Rings, as he and his family have sold them under various names and in various venues for 60 years, including the restaurant next to his house that burned down almost 30 years ago. A big-city food critic even declares them the best he's ever had. But now Larry is getting older and slower, selling the rings he makes by hand with a secret recipe in a small-town bar in southern Minnesota.
Capp, whose family used to live around there and loved the onion rings, decides he wants to make a documentary about Larry. This, despite having no experience in the film industry. And already having a sweet gig as the president of a large caregiver company. And having recently inherited a wad of money from his grandfather. He quits his job and starts working on the movie full-time.
It soon becomes clear that Zach is anything but a dispassionate fly on the wall. He wants good things to happen for Larry -- because he wants to help him, but also because he wants to make the movie better. He has hired veteran directors, editors, cameramen and producers to fly in on private jets to shoot video of a guy who makes 500 bucks a week slinging onion rings.
A curious thing happens with "The Ringmaster." As Larry shies further and further away from the camera, turning down the various deals Zach has made to provide him with a bigger stage for his culinary masterpiece, the movie becomes less about Larry and more about Zach.
Part of this is simple reality -- Larry's not around to film, so they start filming each other talking about why they're not filming Larry. The filmmakers are disappointed that the project hasn't turned out to be what they thought, though for the most part they're content to keep cashing Zach's checks while they figure out what it will be.
For awhile there's talk of having the rings featured at a sort of pawn store theme park -- guns, gold and car races! -- but Larry refuses to cash the check.
At one point he serves his rings to the members of the band KISS as a tryout, which is about a weird a scene as you can imagine. Zach, who has lived in Los Angeles and Las Vegas since childhood, slides right into this showbiz world of mirrors and bullshit, but Larry is like a house rabbit lost in the woods, nervously looking around for wolves.
Later there's a potential deal to make the rings the official snack of the Las Vegas NFL team: "Larry's Raider Rings." We meet the owner of the Raiders, Mark Davis, who is amenable and has the strangest haircut you've ever seen on a grown man.
Time slips on. Soon it's nearly three years that Zach has been working on his movie about Larry. He doesn't have a wife or kids to mention, so the movie is his life. We soon learn he used to have a serious gambling addiction that landed him in rehab -- not coincidentally, shortly before he came into his inheritance and got the idea for the movie. It doesn't take much calculus to realize that Zach has replaced one obsession with another.
This is a weird, sometimes wonderful story about a project that starts with a sense of joy and keeps wanting to steer into a ditch. Zach's treatment of Larry starts to become manipulative, more of Larry's manager than the teller of his story. He's figuratively and literally grabbing him by the elbow, pulling him into business meetings he doesn't want to be in and making him do awkward interviews in which Larry just sort of smiles dazedly into the camera and has to be coaxed to spit more than a couple of words.
Strangely, there are no villains in this piece. Zach sometimes wants things to happen for the movie that aren't happening, so he keeps putting a finger on the scale, then an elbow, then a hip. But he's earnest and overly enthusiastic, not a jerk. His motivations are pure, even if his documentary ethos is not.
We feel sympathy for Larry, a sweet, simple soul, but also a commanding feeling that he's just not an interesting enough guy to be the subject of a 90-minute movie. So the guy making the movie becomes the center of attention.
One of the hired gun filmmakers suggests they should turn the project into a documentary short, somehow condensing 300 hours of footage into a 25-minute runtime. Zach refuses -- he's now invested much of his fortune into the movie, and it will be finished one way or another. It actually does end at about the one-hour mark, but then there's a long and mostly sad coda in which Zach and Larry's relationship comes into clear focus, and we learn something we should've figured out long ago.
This is a strange, strange movie. It's not so much a documentary about a guy who makes onion rings as a documentary about the failed attempt to make that movie. The first documentary was a terrible idea, but the one it becomes isn't so bad.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpS7wMYL87o[/embed]