Absolute Wilson

While filmmaker Katharina Otto-Bernstein should be commended for resisting the impulse to concoct an "interesting" approach to a film about the life and work of the avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, the result is a rather conventional, Biography Channel-style portrait of a man who helped change the face of theater in the last quarter of the 20th century. Otto naturally begins at the beginning, with Wilson's birth in Waco, Texas, to an established family of civic leaders, and his early youth, most of it spent largely alone. Growing up gay and saddled with a stutter, a learning disability and difficult parents, Wilson escaped to New York City in the mid-'60s,...