As one of the fashion world's most influential photographers, Bruce Weber amassed a fortune transforming his private obsessions into marketable public iconography. Whether employed in the service of personal films or glossy ads, Weber's camera reflects the infatuated ardor of a lover's gaze as it contemplates the world not as it is, but how Weber desperately wants it to be. Consequently, his documentaries and freeform cinematic essays often play like extensions of his commercial work. His biggest strength and greatest weakness as a filmmaker remains his remarkable ability to make everything he touches look like a stylish commercial—even, in the case of A Letter To True, vintage WWII footage.
Named after Weber's missive to his beloved dog, A Letter To True documents his pet obsessions of the moment, which include Sept. 11, war, photogenic dogs, actor Dirk Bogarde, a striking young male musician who resembles Elizabeth Taylor, the real Elizabeth Taylor, war photography, Lassie movies, Rin Tin Tin, The Agronomist, Martin Luther King, and surfing. The definition of a vanity film, Weber's latest opus lacks the focus even to qualify as dilettantish. Offering plenty for the eye and little for the brain, the film suffers from a dearth of ideas as it glides pleasantly but emptily from one gorgeous surface to another.
As a filmmaker and thinker, Weber is an excellent fashion photographer, and in spite of his half-hearted efforts, A Letter To True functions less as a film than as an artful assemblage of home movies set to smartly chosen torch songs drenched in the photographer's trademark haunted romanticism. In Weber's cool world, men with soulful eyes and well-defined muscles exude the tragic hipster cool of a young Chet Baker, scantily clad women channel the ripe sexuality of Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor, and ideas are trumped by the visceral power of images. A Letter To True offers Weber's deeply personal take on a tumultuous world, but his rapturous gaze seldom extends beyond his own navel.