In the new docu-fiction “Invention,” directed by Courtney Stephens and starring Callie Hernandez—who shares the “by” credit with Stephens and whose actual family history provides the film’s premise—“fiction and nonfiction overlap and intertwine to vertiginous effect,” Richard Brody writes. “Yet this distinctive form is only one aspect of the film’s modernity. ‘Invention’ proves to be nothing less than an up-to-the-minute report on the American state of mind—on the epidemic inability to distinguish fact from fiction.”

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In the new docu-fiction “Invention,” directed by Courtney Stephens and starring Callie Hernandez—who shares the “by” credit with Stephens and whose actual family history provides the film’s premise—“fiction and nonfiction overlap and intertwine to vertiginous effect,” Richard Brody writes. “Yet this distinctive form is only one aspect of the film’s modernity. ‘Invention’ proves to be nothing less than an up-to-the-minute report on the American state of mind—on the epidemic inability to distinguish fact from fiction.”
 
Callie Hernandez plays a character slyly named Carrie Fernandez, who travels to the Berkshires to claim the ashes of her late father, John, a doctor who was long involved in alternative medicine. Carrie already knew that her father was self-absorbed and irresponsible. Now, through her inquiry of his many unpaid debts and tangled legal web he left behind, she learns that he was considered brilliant—known locally as Dr. J.—and also, persuasive, secretive, paranoid, and deceptive. In short, Carrie gets into deep water pretty quickly. But, as it turns out, the water was plenty deep as soon as she set foot in her father’s neighborhood.
“ ‘Invention’ is a film about pollution—media pollution, the despoiling of the American mind along with the landscape,” Brody writes. “From the foothills of the Berkshires arises a venerable strain of American madness, the poetry of hokum—the old weird America of medicine shows and travelling circuses and carnivals. But, instead of being homegrown, this madness is now echoed through media.” Read his full review

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