A documentary film is often confused with a reality film. In one way, a reality film is really an oxymoron. A film is a work of art, a vision, a dream. Reality is none of those so it is impossible to view a film and have it be “real.” Even when filming reality, the process of capturing certain moments and then editing them skews the truth therefore creating something completely original. Once it is understood that a documentary is an artist’s vision of the truth, the viewer becomes conscious of the manipulation that can occur when viewing a film like Alexander Adolph’s "Con Man Confidential."
Adolph’s film was extremely sympathetic to criminals that ruined hundreds of peoples lives. The clips placed in between the interviews, such as the golf scene or the toy car scene, paired with the nostalgia-inducing music made the viewer imagine they were in the mind of the con man. There were two noticeable themes that the con men shared that also made the viewer understand where they were coming from. One common thread was they all had some sort of traumatic past or childhood, such as spending years at a home for child delinquents or being severely beaten by their parents or having to give up their toy cars for other children to play with them. Another was how all the con men said how stupid their victims were by mentioning things like, “if they would have just checked, made a call, looked it up etc....”
After viewing the film, you really had the feeling that you got inside the mind of a con man. It is hard to imagine that Adolph wanted the viewer to feel anything less than pity and possibly even empathy toward the con men at the end of his film. Adolph’s excellent organization of the documentary into how they conned, their past, their lives as con men, and finally the consequence of their actions, made a perfect circle out of the most imperfect lives.
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