Within the first few moments of HBO’s quartet “The Lady and the Dale”, you get the broad outlines of the story. The title lady is Elizabeth Carmichael, a unique, confident car driver who gained international fame in the 1970s while trying to market the American car industry’s Big Three – General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and the Ford Motor Company. the Dale, a strange car with three wheels (but apparently fuel efficient).
For a short time, the Dale was everywhere, from the front page of the Japanese newspapers to the price floor of ‘The Price is Right’, and Carmichael was just there and posing for press photos expressing herself in the highway in a miniskirt Los Angeles in a “Wonder Woman” -like position. “I do not want to sound like an ego man, but I am a genius,” she tells an interviewer matter-of-factly.
It was an allegation that journalists, investors and competitors wanted to investigate, and soon Carmichael’s stories – about the Dale and herself – began to unravel. The promises about the car were too good to be true, and Carmichael’s fingerprints, obtained by a disgruntled employee, match those of a fraudster who has been fleeing the FBI and the mob for years.
It’s always risky to show so many of your cards up front in a documentary introduction. It’s like the feeling when you look at a particularly striking movie and you think to yourself, “Well, I’ve seen the movie by now.” But sitting down to watch the Duplass Bros.-produced “Lady and the Dale” is almost like embarking on a road trip; you have an idea of your destination, but it is really the stopovers and detours that make it memorable, and that make the periods where things stand out easily forgiving.
“The Lady and the Dale” quickly established Carmichael as a small town Indiana fabulis who pursued a humidrum lifestyle and responsibilities in favor of ‘get rich quick’ schemes. Despite a series of divorces, she eventually married Vivian and had five children, and they jumped from one place to another while still dragging themselves into risky, unconventional and often criminal ventures. When she finally comes out as a transgender, she finds herself in a new city again as the CEO of the 20th Century Motor Company, ready to manufacture the Dale.
It all happens in the first hour-long episode, which sets the tone for a series rich in both source interviews and a surprisingly vivid and charming visual appeal. While Carmichael passed away in 2004, directors Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker (who was a consultant and cast member in ‘Transparent’) tapped into people who knew Carmichael in all facets of her life; they interview two of her children, her brother-in-law, her childhood friends, her employees and her ultimate disadvantages.
It helps to put together an intricate portrait of Carmichael. It would have been easy to present her as a pioneer or as a deceiver, if the truth is that she was both. She made tremendous progress, both as a woman in the automotive industry, and as a transgender figure in the 1970s who had very few peers who shared her life experience, but her plans also drove her family into a controversial, mysterious life. which made her children feel terrible and unharmed for much of their lives. Carmichael was a loving mother to the five children she had with Vivian, but he left several others from her marriages in the past or never met.
To flatten Carmichael’s traits or to try to put her in a single box for the sake of the story would have been a bad service to the real life she lived. As such, it is understandable why the documentary writers linger in certain places a little too long – the explanations of the design plans for the Dale, for example, become a bit repetitive. But there is so much to take in.
It helps that ‘The Lady and the Dale’ is so visually distinct from other contemporary documentary projects that rely on trivial versions or dramatic conversations with archival material. This series is an explosion of live stop-motion animation (done by animated director Sean Donnelly) that almost looks like paper dolls with the faces of different characters brought to life. This technique elevates the source interviews, which are dense with details, to something transcendent.
With the second installment, however, it’s clear that Carmichael just has a big hold on her new life; she walks late on Dale employee pay, makes uncontrolled claims to investors and lies to the media about the status of the vehicle. She also started paying off on a car that at that point had not yet reached the prototype phase of the floor model.
A former colleague tells the day that he knew things were starting to crack. Carmichael bragged to reporters about how the Dale was bulletproof due to a special plastic used to wrap the inside of the vehicle. She said it so much, the colleague said she began to believe it, despite never looking to see if it was true.
But one day Carmichael shows up to work with a gun and uses it to shoot a Dale door about 20 feet away. The bullet did not finish off the plastic; instead, it shattered into thousands of tiny pieces.
There really is no better metaphor for the course of Carmichael’s life at that point – the public discovers her past and R & D money for the Dale runs out. This is when viewers really want to bite. The rest of the documentary is a wild ride.
The first two episodes of “The Lady and the Dale” are on Sunday, January 31 at 9pm on HBO. The next two episodes are released weekly.