Reviewed by Christina McDermott
Stars Louis Theroux | Written by Louis Theroux
UK cert 15 | UK RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 235 minutes | Directed by Emma Cooper
Louis Theroux is a man who has never been afraid to take a walk on the stranger side of life. Indeed, he appears to be the kind of bloke who goes around with one eyebrow perpetually raised, hoping to stumble across a taboo being broken while he's down the shops buying milk. So, when you see that the BBC are bringing out a DVD set of four of his most recent documentaries, you could be forgiven for expecting him to provide you with a little light entertainment as he takes his typical wry look at life.
Law & Disorder is comprised of four documentaries - Law & Disorder in Philadelphia (aka Louis Theroux does The Wire), Law & Disorder in Johannesburg, A Place for Paedophiles (where he interviews patients and therapists at California's Coalinga Mental Hospital) and Crystal Meth (which focuses on the citizens of the community of Central Valley, California where crystal meth addiction is at its most prolific in the US).
In each of these, he seemingly bumbles around, coming across as that gawky posh guy in the corner who has inadvertently strayed into the middle of one hot mess. Of course, the reality is that he is much more clued up than many people take him to be, and his ability of asking incredibly incisive, non-judgemental questions humanises his interviewees, making them come across not as addicts, paedophiles and criminals, but real people with real thoughts, feelings and hopes for the future.
The seriousness of the quartet does, on occasion, get a bit much. Occasionally, you long for a bit of light relief - for Louis to break into an impromptu rap, or get dragged into a vomiting competition, just anything to break away from the sheer, unrelenting misery of the situations he finds himself in. A perfect case in point comes during his time in South Africa. If Theroux's documentary is to be believed, it is a country where the reality is far removed from the happy "rainbow nation" image it attempts to portray. Instead, it is presented to us as a place teeming from top to bottom with violence - where you take your life into their hands just by stopping at a red traffic light in Johannesburg, and where people in townships are frequently forced to rely on small private security firms due to the shortcomings of the official police service.
In saying that, sometimes even Theroux must realise that what he is showing us almost borders on parody. In A Place For Paedophiles he's taken to see a machine, the PPG, that essentially measures how flaccid the subject's penis is when they're shown a variety of stimuli; you can't help wondering if even he realises that, if he were back to doing the pop culture vignettes he cut his teeth on, both he and his audience would be sniggering at this like schoolchildren.
Still. You can't argue with the fact that Theroux is an engaging and talented documentary maker - one who appears to be genuinely capable of making people open up and talk about themselves and their problems on camera. Unfortunately, all of the documentaries we see in the Law & Disorder are completely without any kind of bright side. After watching them all, you get the sense that the areas he visits and the people he speaks to are so firmly entrenched in their situations that there's no way out, no light at the end of the tunnel for them to strive for. Granted, it might not make such interesting television if he were to show us places and people desperately trying to better themselves, but by choosing not to show the other side of the coin, he does both himself and his audience a disservice.
If you're looking for vintage Theroux, then this isn't it. But if you want to see the human side of society's underclass, then you could do a lot worse.
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