Critical Response
Much critical response to Medium Cool focused around the revolutionary techniques of combining fact and fiction rather than the plot of the film. In his 1969 review, Roger Ebert wrote "In Medium Cool, Wexler forges back and forth through several levels...There are fictional characters in real situations...there are real characters in fictional situations." While Ebert did not find the plot to be particularly innovative, he acknowledged that Wexler purposely left it up to his audience to fill in the gaps of the romance, and at the same time presented images of great political significance. Ultimately, Ebert credited Wexler with masterfully combining multiple levels of filmmaking to create a film that is "important and absorbing."
Similarly, in his 1969 review of the film for The New York Times, Vincent Canby credits Wexler with presenting his audience with powerful imagery through the use of documentary filmmaking techniques. He wrote that Medium Cool was "an angry, technically brilliant movie that uses some of the real events of last year the way other movies use real places — as backgrounds that are extensions of the fictional characters." Like Ebert, Canby pointed out that the political atmosphere of the film fills in the blanks left open by a relatively superficial plot. Furthermore, Canby noted the film's historical significance: "The result is a film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence." Like Ebert, Canby felt that the real significance of the film was in its capturing of a specific political situation rather than its conventional success through plot and character development. Canby wrote: "Medium Cool is an awkward and even pretentious movie, but... it has an importance that has nothing to do with literature."
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