If we start looking at the history of mockumentaries, we have to go back to one of the first documentaries in history: ‘Nanook, the Eskimo’ was intended to be real, of course, but everything (or almost everything) was prepared in advance. It was Flaherty himself who said that to capture the true spirit of something you have to distort it. It was the same thing that Buñuel must have thought when turning ‘Las Hurdes: tierra sin pan’ into a kind of parody of the Sahara documentaries that were so popular at the time.
Since then, and especially since the emergence of the reality show, the genre has grown enough that a mockumentary no longer seems groundbreaking to us. Víctor García León is fully aware of the language that he must handle in order for a film of this genre to be credible enough and, at the same time, let us be fully aware of its falsehood. Sadly, what he managed to embroider in the incredible ‘Selfie’ watered down a lot in ‘The Three Wise Men: The Truth’.
I won’t forgive you, Carmena
The first minutes of the Amazon Prime Video tape are overwhelming: the new representative of the Three Wise Men, a kind of Paquita Salas mixed with the innocence of Magüi, tries to renew its brand image, damaged by the passing of the years and, above all, by the presence of Santa Claus. That is why he has decided to record a documentary to show everyone how they live, what leads them to distribute gifts, their radical change for the 21st century and their hobbies. And it is here where the greatest findings of the tape are found.
A Gaspar in the style of ‘El buen patrón’, a new age Baltasar, an unsympathetic Melchor aware that he is the one pulling the cart… The film is not afraid of stretching the popular imagination to the point of almost breaking it in a playful first act, fun and at the same time suitable for the whole family, which sadly becomes a parody of modern life and culminates in a sugary, childish concoction that completely betrays the spirit of its first minutes.
There was a moment, I’m sure, in which ‘The Three Wise Men: The truth’ it was a bloody parody of the magical trio and its forced adaptation to new times, but sadly it has not survived because they have not dared to shoot it without a sweet ending. And it is that a family film could not leave aside the dreams of children, magic and all those trifles that do not matter at all throughout the rest of the footage, more careful in create a convincing and original personality of the Magi that the tape itself then mercilessly destroys.
Gold, myrrh and TikTok
To make the matter of making the Magi more modern more credible, García León has a host of celebrities who approach them to give their opinion, from Esty Quesada (I’m a Pringada) to Almudena Cid, Lorenzo Caprile, Rozalen, Jordi Hurtado or Inmagic, who has one of the best gags of the group, in which the Kings are mistreated in a shopping center because the kids are going to queue up to see an influencer.
It is true that the script falls a bit into the oldenism of “Oh, the young people of today, anyone understands them”, although they never fully exploit it: Baltasar as a Twitter addict is such a good concept that it is surprising that it remains a couple of gags without much of a journey, and the healthy diet of the Three Kings could have offered laughter instead of a couple of jokes. It seems as if, throughout the footage, the film was rapidly losing the sharpness that was intuited in its first section.
The cast, yes, never loses its grace: the choice of three seasoned but unknown actors as Reyes is a success, because it is the only way to believe in the filming of the documentary without being constantly outside of it. The three They manage to turn a movie that could be a disaster into a family success that it would have benefited from being more focused on keeping the same tone throughout the film rather than lurching between the more stinging satire and the straight-to-Disney Channel movie.
Holland can be seen
I don’t want to be too harsh with ‘The Three Wise Men: The Truth’, because it doesn’t deserve it. However, one cannot help but sense his intentions to turn everything upside down and pure family hooliganism truncated by a strange sense of parental responsibility in his last act, leaving his deconstruction, which could be hilarious, to nothing. Looking at it on the bright side, the equity he achieves between adult satire and family Christmas movie tone is not so easy to achieve, and never crosses childish red lines such as valuing the mere existence of the Kings. They exist, and that’s it.
The best moments of ‘The Three Wise Men: The Truth’ are those in which they explain their own story: the star they followed, the baby Jesus, the two thousand years they have been alive, the management and distribution of gifts… It is true that the film never dares to take the last step and, for example, show Gaspar as a ruthless CEO (although I have no doubt that he was in a version of the script, of which something has survived in the first act) or Baltasar turned into a tweetstar. It simply remains in the kinder face: instead of reviewing and giving color to the gags, he limits himself to sketching themwith the laudable intention (at least in a family movie) of not upsetting anyone more than necessary.
‘Los Reyes Magos: La verdad’ starts with a lot of force, gives it everything and surprises with a mix between ‘Paquita Salas’ and ‘The office’, but soon he runs out of ideas and ends up falling into a tidal wave of commonplaces, celebrity cameos and somewhat threadbare criticism of modernity. It is true that Spanish family cinema is more closely linked to nonsense, movies with smarty kids and crude slapstick, and in this sense it is notably out of the ordinary. Hopefully, this film will be able to model a family cinema with a little more bad temper. and don’t treat kids like idiots. For dreaming, that does not remain.