Mantegna doesn’t give viewers room to breathe, to take in Provincetown as it is today. Giving a little bit of the present before handing it over to Cumming for what Provincetown was like in the past, the rhythm is interrupted, which triggers curiosity about why all the history couldn’t be covered before getting to the town in the present day. Yes, it would seem like the typical documentary that’s all about the present, even though it is obligated to cover the past, but we would have gotten to present-day Provincetown faster. In fact, at the beginning, Cumming goes from the Pilgrims to the arrival of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1899 turning Provincetown into an artist’s community at such record speed, that we still learn all this without any of the history being lost to such fast talk. But this style continues, with parenthetical narration by Cumming that still breaks the rhythm and tone.
The modern-day people in PTown Diaries are endlessly interesting. There’s the very open-minded Deb Evans of Pied Bar, whose love for Provincetown is representative of the entire town. Sara Leketa, a singer/songwriter, will sing anywhere, and there’s also the sadly-underutilized drag performer Hedda Lettuce, who we only see commenting on the ubiquitous Lemonade Girls, little girls that walk up and down Commercial Street, the main artery of Provincetown, shout-selling fresh lemonade. These are the people to be covered at length, but they’re not, not even the wonderful drag kickball game seen at the end.
Mantegna ably covers such towering figures as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Jackson Pollock, lawyer Roy Cohn, and authors Michael Cunningham and Norman Mailer are on hand to talk up Provincetown, or in Mailer’s case, pontificate and pontificate and pontificate. Being the director of Norman Mailer: An American, Mantegna would naturally have Mailer here, who loves Provincetown in a muted fashion, while Cunningham loves it for the crowds he needs to lose himself in after a day of solo writing.
Obviously Mantegna loves Provincetown, but it feels like he can’t decide where he wants to be there, what he wants to cover. Maybe it’s the style of Provincetown when you’re actually there, that so much goes on at once that you’re so completely, happily bombarded with all the sights and sounds of the town. And yet, even as PTown Diaries remains informative, there are so many lost opportunities that pass by. Mantegna at least interviews a town selectman who also has a radio show as the character Lady Di, but the documentary never fully finds its full-throated footing.
Cinema Libre Studio has released PTown Diaries on DVD, and also included are trailers for Norman Mailer: The American, Teen A Go-Go, The Forgotten Bomb, Meth, For My Wife, and 2501 Migrants. Knowing vaguely of Cinema Libre until now, it’s apparent just from PTown Diaries and these trailers that it’s all about striving to make people really open their eyes, hearts, and minds to worlds they don’t know, to urgent issues they haven’t readily considered. That mission has a strong backbone and never wavers, but without a set agenda. It seems to want viewers to watch what they offer, and form their own opinions. It’s all up to them.
Even with PTown Diaries’ at-times indecisive nature, Mantegna has chosen quite a remarkable town to show off. I can’t think of any other place in the United States like this. Provincetown is the real deal. It lives absolutely what it claims to be.
