By JOHN BOORMAN (Faber & Faber; 2020)

England’s John Boorman is arguably one of the world’s most interesting directors. His five decade filmmaking career has turned out classics like POINT BLANK, DELIVERANCE and EXCALIBUR, and fascinating oddities like LEO THE LAST and ZARDOZ; even his outright failures, which include EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC and WHERE THE HEART IS, are interesting. Boorman provided an elegantly drafted memoir back in 2003, in the form of ADVENTURES OF A SUBURBAN BOY, and with CONCLUSIONS he completes it—in a fashion.

Readers of the former book will note that it only went up to the making of the 1991 BBC production I DREAMT I WOKE UP, leaving off the half-dozen films Boorman made since. Now in his late eighties, in the appropriately titled CONCLUSIONS he finally gives his thoughts on those films. Boorman’s advanced age doubtless accounts for the book’s rambling nature, incorporating as it does straight autobiography, poetry, drawings, lessons on filmmaking and a great deal of recycled material from the previous book. CONCLUSIONS, then, is not an entirely satisfying read, but I suspect Boorman is simply too old to care.

CONCLUSIONS, then, is not an entirely satisfying read, but I suspect Boorman is simply too old to care.

Boorman’s post-1991 films have admittedly not approached the earlier ones in ambition or execution. Regarding BEYOND RANGOON (1995), Boorman devotes more ink to the real figures that inspired it than the film itself, while in writing about THE GENERAL (1998) he admits the film’s critics, who accused it of glamorizing criminality, may have had a point. On THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (2001) Boorman is largely positive (claiming it “spoke of how our fragile world could be plunged into chaos by the fantasies of a self-serving man. The current occupant of the White House springs to mind”), but concedes that with IN MY COUNTRY (2004) he did indeed, as one observer stated, “come a cropper.” He suffered an even bigger failure two years later with THE TIGER’S TAIL, whose uniformly negative reception led to an erosion of confidence. It was followed by 2014’s QUEEN AND COUNTRY, pointedly referred to as “my last film.”

Among the other subjects covered in CONCLUSIONS are the traumatic death of Boorman’s daughter Telsche in 1996 and those of his many friends and collaborators (in a chapter entitled “Dying Friends”), the great directors with whom he’s come into contact over the years, the Irish village of Annamoe where Boorman lives, his family and, of course, his own mortality, a subject with which Boorman at this advanced stage of his life is understandably obsessed.