“Most Valuable Whatever” (2015) dir. Errol Morris

One of Errol Morris’s chief preoccupations is obsession. So let’s have him encounter some sports fans and see how that goes.

Note: I usually prefer videos I can embed here, but understandably ESPN wants to keep this video in its stable. Forgive the click away and the short ad at the start.

Most Valuable Whatever via ESPN Films.

In 2015 ESPN Films paired with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to produce six shorts in a series called “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports.” The shorts – whose topics include a death-defying heist at the center of a basketball rivalry, an inside look at bulbous mascot Mr. Met, and a man whose greatest accomplishment is getting naked at the Super Bowl – may not absolve anybody of the “crazy” label, but they do provide a nice excuse to again pair Morris gallery of obsessives to interrogate.

“Most Valuable Whatever” profiles the winning bidders at auctions for odd (and frankly disgusting) sports memorabilia and a couple of auctioneers who watch the valuable junk go by. Morris displays his curiosity about the items themselves. Naturally this transitions into curiosity around the motives of the bidders, which leads to digressions about careless father dentists and speculation about DNA testing on a wad of bubblegum.

Culling and curating the odd and the notorious has always been Morris’s stock in trade. Narrative directors know the success of a film rests on the casting and Morris knows the strength of a story lies in who’s telling it. He inserts himself in his films, often including the audio of his off-camera questions delivered via the “Interrotron” – a teleprompter alteration that allows Morris’s subject to look directly into the lens as they talk to Morris.

But Morris knows when to push his role as instigator in the conversation and when to allow the subject to reveal his or herself. Here, Morris doesn’t have to make any kind of explicit statement about the handshake between high and low cultures when money is to be made. All he has to do is prevent an interview with a man who smirks out the phrase “I happen to know quite a lot about Vermeer” that centers around the relative value of used dentures.

For a time Morris worked as a private detective and it’s not hard to picture him collecting details dropped by his interviewees and assembling them into something resembling a solution. A strange obsession here, a colorful turn of phrase there – Morris recognizes that these aren’t just entertaining digressions. They’re pieces of the complete picture of the story.

• Further reading: Here, as is the case most of the time, Morris’s subjects are linked by topic first with theme created later. It’d be interesting if he’d one day return to linking subjects primarily by theme.