Movies

Gore Vidal doc offers glowing portrait of brilliant writer

An incorrigibly injudicious man receives fair treatment in “Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia,” a documentary portrait of the writer, wit, scold, bon vivant, crank and friend to everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy to Paul Newman and Bruce Springsteen.

Nicholas Wrathall is admiring, if not particularly deep, in a film built on interviews with Vidal, who died two years ago, and such compatriots as Christopher Hitchens and Tim Robbins (who featured Vidal in his movie “Bob Roberts”). Unresolved, for instance, is the question of why Vidal kept running for office while proclaiming his lack of interest in politics and his contempt for the US — he believed FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and said of 9/11, “We had that coming.”

Still, Vidal’s conversation was scintillating, and he wielded one of the cleverest pens of his age. The film, like the man, is never boring.