Review: Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

In our modern age of cultural engagement via disposable, rapidly produced clickbait, the slow and deliberate analogue practices of Robert Caro are reassuringly cool. The legendary author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and a four-volumes-and-counting biography of Lyndon Johnson writes his first several drafts by hand. When Caro feels that the writing has reached a certain level of quality, he begins typing and revising his pages. Caro pours through boxes of files in museums for months at a time looking for proof of a defining incident. These writing habits are the equivalent of chiseling at marble—painstaking and obsessive. Caro doesn’t bother with deadlines, because getting it right is the criterion.

Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb, who’ve worked together for 50 years, and who’re both around 90 years old, live a monastic existence that feels impossible for modern citizens for a variety of reasons—mostly having to do with money, time, and perceptions of an audience’s potential interest in the matter at hand. To be financially enabled to write a singular multi-volume work, an epic of American political process concerned with a president who isn’t firing up the headlines anymore, is a privilege as well as a celebration of depth over breadth.

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Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is a celebration of such profound, dying privilege. Director Lizzie Gottlieb is Robert’s daughter, and her father’s occupation with detail seems to have seeped into her bones. This isn’t a documentary as confessional—an act of narcissism looking to even the score with Daddy. Nor is Turn Every Page personal in an obvious, ham-handed way. The director’s kinship with her father is implicit in her attentiveness to her subjects; she honors the fascination that Caro and Gottlieb have with capturing life. The result could be a film that’s mostly catnip for writers and editors. More time is devoted to Caro and Gottlieb’s debate over the use of semicolons than in uncovering juicy gossip. This principle is, for the committed audience, a tonic of rationality.

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Gottlieb interviews Caro and her father—separately, for the most part. Theirs is a productive but contentious relationship. As an editor, Gottlieb works quickly and perhaps more instinctively than Caro does as a writer. Caro has written five, soon to be six, books over the last 50 years, while Gottlieb has edited an astonishing array of work that could constitute a modern American canon. He edited Catch-22, even shaping the title, and former collaborators include Toni Morrison and Bill Clinton. Gottlieb helped whittle The Power Broker down to 1,200 pages, claiming that Caro set him up with a rare challenge: All of the book was good, but it wasn’t a manageable length and no one thought they could sell one volume about Moses, let alone multiple. Now, The Power Broker is considered a must-read for political wonks.

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Beneath the pedigree of the respective parties, Gottlieb and Caro’s relationship suggests that of the prototypical writer-editor relationship. Writers who crawl up into the recess of their mind often produce writing that they’re in love with, tasking the editor to guide that writing toward accessibility and clarity. Turn Every Page teems with delicious specifics, such as Gottlieb having to tell Caro to cool it on his overuse of the word “loom.” It’s a dramatic word, Gottlieb says, and Caro loves dramatic words, but several times over the course of a hundred pages is repetitive.

For a writer, it’s reassuring to hear someone as formidable as Caro receive the sort of notes that all writers get from editors. A writer must have the humility to accept guidance, which the editor must be willing to provide in good faith. Named after a fastidious research practice imparted to Caro early in life, Turn Every Page casually refutes the idea that people seem to have of writing as an act of conjuring, with prose flowing fully formed out of the author’s fingertips. Art-making of all sorts is work, a trade like any other that requires diligence and patience.

There’s a great scene in Turn Every Page in which Caro tells us the story of his writing of The Power Broker’s opening, in which he struggled to convey Moses’s influence over New York City in order to quickly draw in the reader. He thought of the opening passages of The Illiad, the rhythmic citing of armies, and fashioned a similar syntax over a period of many rewrites. The result is unusually gripping prose, especially considering that the subject is urban development, a pivotal arena of human life and organization that’s too often obscured by impenetrable jargon. Freeing political arcana from jargon and bias is Caro’s project, an act of democracy enabled in part by Gottlieb, and now enabled again by his daughter, who’s imparted to her audience this generous documentary about honorable work done honorably.

Score: 
 Director: Lizzie Gottlieb  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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