Kevin MacDonald's entirely satisfying film, Marley (2012) uses many elements of the documentary toolkit to explore and comment on Marley's origins and rise to superstardom. An elegant flyover, for example, brings us to Marley's rural childhood home in Jamaica. Fascinating interviews pool together the individual strands of Marley's story into a comprehensive whole (third still: Bunny Wailer). Well-chosen archival footage gives a sense of immediacy to events decades past. The personal, the commercial, the romantic, and the political mesh in the film as they did in Marley's life. Well-chosen archival footage seems to place us right in the middle of
events as they happen.
