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There's something about raw, uninterrupted footage that holds a deeper meaning and truth than something with a highly stylized compilation of sound effects and cool video transitions would.  Directors Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman have created a documentary that closely illustrates the struggle between the voice of the subject under observation and the voice of the docu-filmmaker. "Nanking" an 88-minute heartbreaking look at a highly-overlooked moment in history when Japan invaded the city in December of 1937 (pre-Pearl Harbor days) and conducted a massacre of over 250,000 Chinese civilians (many women and children) and ex-soldiers over the course of a handful of weeks.

First the good: "Nanking" boldly lets minutes of footage roll at a time, sometimes without voiceover, of Chinese victims burning alive, being beheaded, or getting dragged away to get raped.  And I don't mean these are "good" incidents, but rather good in the aesthetic choice to let the images speak for themselves, plainly.  Nothing is more startling than watching it unfold, in horror, in real time.  Another well-thought out choice was the swiftness in the script: there are less than ten talking heads of actual Chinese survivors describing their horrid stories of survival and loss.  This isn't a Ken Burns spectacle; think of Tim Blake Nelson's "The Grey Zone" where we have a more intimate story set in front of a scope of war.

Diverse aesthetic choices both bless and plague this doc, however.  When the actual survivors are not on the screen, the Directors have inexplicably decided to tell the parts of the story that concern the expatriates (American missionaries, doctors, college professors, and a Nazi affiliate) who helped in the saving of an innumerable amount of lives, through modern Hollywood actors reading the actual letters and memoirs of those individuals.  It's the weirdest of an experience watching it.  I don't mind the dramatization of hard materials, but having a Hollywood actor, dressed in the same garment of the person they are representing, and reading off a cue card into a camera (shot from the shoulders up) plays like an awkward SNL skit at times.  Sometimes it's embarassing to watch.  Watching Jurge Prochnow play Josh Rabe (the Nazi affiliate) read a cue card (you can tell by his skewered eye direction) is both off-putting and tremendously fake.  Other times, it's down right creepy.  Mariel Hemingway as Minnie Vautrin overdoes her reading, and is borderline parodying the role Vautrin played in the ordeal.  Her squinted eyes at certain syllables in her lines almost help her reach an iambic pentameter in her oration; she should have had a skull in one of her hands, in the manner of Hamlet.  Other players like Jon Getz ("Blood Simple"), Stephen Dorff ("Blade"), and Woody Harrelson (one-time auteur of the oxygen bar) are harmless but the whole gimmick is just--well, a gimmick.

The documentary could have sat next to such iconic and important docs like "Hearts & Minds" had it stuck to the bare bones material: actual incident-associated talking heads, uncompromising footage and tight editing. Again, I'm all for voiceovers and dramatizations, but here with this Hollywood stage trick--it just doesn't play.  Think of that scene in "No Direction Home" where Scorsese's voice is heard reading Bob Dylan's speech at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, while actual photos from the event are keyframed across the screen. Now imagine that same scene played out with Scorsese, actually sitting in front of the camera, dressed like Dylan, harmonica and all, reading the speech into the camera.  Not too appealing.

Again, I don't want to detract too much from the overall importance of the doc.  It's a stunning story and a reminder to the triumph of human moral victory (to think that as many refugees were saved near the close is as astounding as the huge number that were slaughtered in the weeks before) but it doesn't need Billy from "White Men Can't Jump" in it, at all.

Guttentag and Sturman pay respect to the voice of their subject, but they make the fatal mistake of letting their misled stylistic impulses get the best of them.