Filmmaker Dana Brown makes a lot of mistakes in his “Dust to Glory” documentary, a chronicling of the Baja 1000 off-road race travails. His major error is that he doesn’t just shut up and get out of the way.
The SCORE Baja 1000 is either big-time cool or too stupid to contemplate, depending upon how much chest-thumping machismo courses through your veins. Watching a lone rider on a motorcycle, hurtling at 100 m.p.h. along a rocky, sandy, narrow disaster of a road that even cattle eschew, is captivating. In the Baja speed doesn’t kill, it saves. Sometimes the faster a racer goes, the better his flow over the ruts and imperfections in this free-form, 800-mile (despite the 1,000 in the title) improvisation that describes a loop through Baja California country, starting and ending in Ensenada.
Sounds cool, doesn’t it? But Brown becomes seduced by the trappings and shoots indiscriminately, not editing very well, like that first-time visitor who photographs everything, because who knows when they’re coming back? The net result is too many stories touched upon, none in sufficient depth to really galvanize. So you wind up with a 90-minute Baja 1000 commercial, set to music and cliches.
“It’s a place where reality is on holiday.”
“It’s like a girl that breaks your heart.”
“This is not for wusses . . . let’s face it.”
Baja isn’t a real course, per se, just a general guideline, with checkpoints riders must visit. There are rocks, boulders, logs and ruts, and the deep, fine silt that works like quicksand, trying to end the race of any and all. Through all of this, racers, most of whom work relay-style, gather in all sorts of vehicles, from original VW Beetles with no engine or suspension modifications, to all-out off-road trucks that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The roads are open, the spectators are right there, as on the edge as the drivers, and one out-of-control competitor away from becoming well and truly dead.
So who cares about CART driver Jimmy Vasser giggling with his buds about how bad their race was, or some 16-year-old kid who just got his license, and is now driving the Baja?
No documentarist should think that his subject is as cool as Brown does, and that dooms this film to ordinariness.
The biggest, best story in this movie is that of motorcycle racer Mike “Mouse” McCoy, who decided to ride the whole Baja by himself.
Every. Last. Mile.
We see the story in his face at the halfway point, harrowed, wild and expressive, eyes bugged out as he repeats himself like a junkie, for hooked he is–on adrenaline, on getting this danged thing done and yes, winning. McCoy does his dance and yes, he bites it, like you know that he will, because that’s Baja. But he also gets up and finishes, because that’s Baja, too.
And if this magical story hadn’t gotten lost in the trappings, if only Brown hadn’t been so obsessed with trying to show us how difficult this race is that he missed the perfect chance to show us exactly how difficult this race is, he could have made magic.
`Dust to Glory’
(star)(star)
Narrated, written and directed by Dana Brown; director of photography, Kevin Ward; edited by Brown and Scott Waugh; produced by Waugh and Mike McCoy. An IFC Films release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:35. MPAA rating: PG (racing action and peril, and for some language).
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kmwilliams@tribune.com
