By his own admission, Matthew VanDyke’s early life was a sheltered affair. The only child of a single mother, he had few friends and suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. After college, he took a cue from his heroes T. E. Lawrence and Australian adventurer Alby Mangels, setting off on a tour of the Arab world by motorcycle, an experience that he documented on video. Following two such trips and stints as an amateur journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan, one would think that he had had enough thrills. However, when the Libyan civil war broke out in 2011, VanDyke returned to fight against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces alongside the friends he had made in that country.
VanDyke recounts his tribulations—including a five-month stretch in solitary confinement as a prisoner-of war—in Marshall Curry’s new documentary feature, Point and Shoot. Although Curry (Street Fight, If a Tree Falls) provides the script and direction, the film also belongs to VanDyke, who narrates and supplies the bulk of the footage. Point and Shoot therefore takes on a bit of its subject’s personality: seemingly guileless and easy-going, yet strangely elliptical at times, and ever attentive to an image’s power to shape impressions.
Fortunately, even when observed through the lens of self-promotion, VanDyke is an intriguing and contradictory character. Initially, he seems like a naïve American with a head full of Hollywood fantasies, yet his slightly spacey earnestness never wanes, even after his imprisonment. His fierce loyalty to his Libyan friends is evident, as is his conflicted mindfulness of the hazy line separating documentarian from participant. If nothing else, Point and Shoot provides valuable context for VanDyke’s personal evolution and his choices, turning an American footnote to the Arab Spring into a deeply human story.
Point and Shoot opens Friday, December 12 at the Landmark Tivoli Theatre, 6350 Delmar, 314-727-7271.
