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National Gallery Movie Review

National Gallery is a 2014 documentary film directed by Frederick Wiseman. It’s a solid, but overlong doc.

This is a documentary that goes inside one of the great museums of the world: The National Gallery in London. This documentary was shortlisted for the Oscar that year, but it wasn’t nominated. It’s renowned, but I found it to be overlong and very flawed. There was no reason for this film to be three hours long, making for a tiresome viewing experience.

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Whenever we have a documentary that focuses on one microcosm, this time around it’s a museum, the highlight is always going to be seeing how this place operates from the inside. And certainly those scenes that showed the entire museum and how the workers there did their jobs were terrific, but it’s a shame that those scenes were in the minority as most of the movie was devoted to the speeches about paintings themselves.

Some of these were quite revelatory and engaging, but most were not all that interesting. The biggest problem here was the fact that they failed to connect the dots for those viewers who don’t know their art best. Introducing these paintings and their artists before talking about them would have made the film much more enjoyable.

National Gallery is well directed by Wiseman and very well shot throughout. The film’s beginning was particularly interesting and a great opener. But the editing and pacing left a lot to be desired and most of the movie felt repetitious in its structure and lacking the vigor and diversity of style that would have made it more interesting for me. The scenes of the people working there talking in conferences were not as interesting as the director clearly thought they would be and I would have preferred a glimpse at how the museum operates instead.

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