Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski

He wrote a warning in a child's art book. Netflix made the adult produce the film.

Stanislav Szukalski took the DiCaprio family's copy of his monograph and inked the front. Observer printed the line. "A warning. Please do not grow up too fast." George DiCaprio, underground comics distributor, had been bringing Leonardo to Granada Hills after collector Glenn Bray found the old Polish sculptor a short drive from the Valley. Bray bought a book of the work by chance in 1971, then learned the man was still alive, still talking, and happy to hold court for the local underground. Robert Crumb put him in Weirdo. Robert Williams and Jim Woodring sat in. Leonardo grew up around the plasters. He later funded a 2000 retrospective at the Laguna Art Museum and kept collecting the bronzes Bray recast from what was left in Los Angeles. The only on-screen Leonardo in Irek Dobrowolski's Netflix documentary is that child in a photograph. The adult is a producer, next to his father, latestnetflix.com contends, on a film that spends most of its runtime inside Bray's 1980s tapes of an old man who still called himself a genius. ,

Szukalski was born in Warta in 1893, shuttled between Poland and Chicago, studied in Krakow, and palled around as a teenager with Ben Hecht. A Nazi bombing raid wrecked the work he had left in Poland. By the time Bray found him he was spending less time on sculpture and more on Zermatism, a homemade history in which humanity crawled out of Easter Island and a half-Yeti race explained every horror. IMDb kept one of the late quotes. "If you want to create new things for this world, never listen to anybody. You have to suck your wisdom, all the knowledge, from your thumb." Netflix's own trailer sold "the greatest artist you've never heard of," with Leonardo's producing credit up front, and dropped the film worldwide on 21 December 2018. Runtime 115 minutes. TV-MA. The Hollywood son put his name on the tape. , , ,

The tapes were tender. The Polish pamphlets were not.

The snag, as the Observer story frames it, is that Szukalski's memory went soft on the thorniest decade, and some of that work later fed ugly nationalist corners in Poland. Wikipedia's page on the film is blunt about the same turn. Nationalism and antisemitism before the war, repentance after, and a circle of California friends who had to decide what the late-life charm was worth. George DiCaprio is one of the people the movie leaves struggling. Bray is more willing to treat it as a period fever. Karen Han in The New York Times said the title promises more than most documentaries can carry, then admitted Dobrowolski actually delivered, and that Bray and George become subjects themselves. The viewer is left to decide. A Hollywood son produced a portrait of the neighbor who signed his art book, then had to watch the neighbor's 1930s pages walk into the frame. , ,