'Great Speeches from a Dying World': Device lifts documentary to inspiring higher level

In "Great Speeches from a Dying World," Seattle-based filmmaker Linas Phillips goes into the streets to find the people living there. He clearly gained a level of trust with some of the homeless, for they share their stories and their lives with him.

If this were the extent of the film's approach it would be a solid enough contribution to a nonfiction tradition of films about the homeless -- a tradition that, by coincidence, includes that 1984 classic about street kids in Seattle, "Streetwise."

But "Great Speeches" adds something else, which its title indicates. As we meet and observe each of the people Phillips has included, their stories always build to a point where they turn to the camera and begin reciting the hallowed words of a particularly noble piece of writing.

It sounds like a gimmick: Here is a homeless person, speaking the familiar phrases of John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" inaugural address, or a cherished bit of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet when you actually watch the film, the concept is strangely, unexpectedly moving. The words are stirring, and when their inspirational messages are gamely recited by people whose luck has run out, their messages sound completely new again.

The speeches include quotations from Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, John Donne and the Bible. Those sequences are not set apart from the portraits, but woven into Phillips' interviews with his subjects.

Of course the actual speeches make up only a small percentage of the running time, but the rest is absorbing -- by turns sad and hopeful.

Phillips follows one homeless man, whose ups and downs in life are stupefying, and keeps returning to him throughout the movie. There is no varnish placed on this account, and nobody in the film is made saintly by virtue of his or her disadvantages.

Phillips' previous film was "Walking to Werner," a surprisingly enjoyable chronicle of his decision to walk from Seattle to Los Angeles to meet his favorite filmmaker, Werner Herzog. Here, he keeps himself mostly offscreen, except in instances where it would be weird not to acknowledge that the person behind the camera has obviously become involved in his subjects' lives.

So the movie is about lives, and also words. Oratorical grandness, the power of spoken words, was frequently derided during the recent presidential campaign, and it's true that people should be wary of empty phrases. But words that inspire or lift are important, as "Great Speeches" reminds us in a new way.