ulitzer Prize-winning artist Patrick Oliphant is likely the most widely-published political cartoonist in the United States – and maybe in the entire world. It was said that someone hadn’t truly made it in Washington until Oliphant made fun of them on paper – an aphorism that led him to be reviled by some politicians as much as he was revered by others, alongside a similarly divided public. Without a doubt, his exaggerated caricatures are iconic; for anyone interested in, or in-the-know, concerning modern politics, his images will be familiar.

Since this documentary chronicles not just his career lampooning governmental figures but also his personal life, it begins with his not-so-humble origins in Australia, as his uncle was the well-known physicist who contributed to the creation of the atomic bomb, involved with Robert Oppenheimer. As it charts, quite briefly, his first marriage and resulting children, along with how he started off in the newspaper business, intending to be a journalist, it smartly maintains its attention on the most fascinating and relevant elements of his formative years, which would be his illustrations, skipping most of the behind-the-scenes details. He fell into the role of the local paper’s cartoonist when the previous one vacated the position, though since nothing much happened in Australia, his initial works tended to reflect mundane things like the weather, or the ever-popular beach, or a penguin that happened to be in the office. It was with this diminutive creature, named Punk, that Pat began to develop his eye for visual criticism and skewering, using a depiction of the cute little intruder on the very edges of the page to add additional commentary to the primary components.

Ultimately, he wanted to go to the United States, as that was the center of political unrest and more riveting subject matters for his sketches. And though his bosses at the Denver Post, in Colorado where he settled, immediately wondered what an Australian might know about American politics, it was a mere couple of years before he won the Pulitzer Prize – an award to which he didn’t give much credence or reverence. To elaborate upon Pat’s continued significance in the industry and his overall legacy are numerous, standard documentary inclusions, such as talking heads (like his relatives, friends, and peers), archival footage, family photographs and home videos, and interviews with Pat himself – as conducted by off-screen director Bill Banowsky. And the film is broken into chapters (with animated introductions), though some of them do little but stretch out the runtime, even if a section such as one about the history of political cartoons is nonetheless engaging for audiences responsive to this topic.

“My constituents can’t read, but dammit they can see pictures!” The most absorbing aspect of this documentary just might be an early question posed directly to Pat about whether or not he thinks his art influenced public perception. While some of his fellow cartoonists don’t believe so much in their own consequence, it’s certain that these people provide a voice to citizens who are on the same page with their notions yet don’t have the platform to poke fun or castigate. While this production circles back to personal familial complications on occasion, it doesn’t often stray too far away from the cartoons themselves, which vacillate between flashing onto the screen too briefly to fully take in (especially with the numerous captions), to more appropriately zooming around between features before pulling back to a full-image shot – all of which are biting, funny, damning, and saddening in their exposures of folly.

It’s lightly technical when it covers Pat’s processes and it stalls intermittently when it dwells on unrelated personal items, from relationships to other art forms to historical notes (or the tragedies of aging and approaching the end of a career), but the documentary is mostly well-designed and routinely entertaining. It’s supplemented by excellent musical selections and sound effects, and annotations on the importance of Oliphant’s considerable success and the shocking decline/death of the editorial cartoonist role itself (largely suppressed by misguided or partisan media owners, and replaced in part by memes), managing to squeeze nearly 350 cartoons into the frame (out of his more than 10,000 submissions), though he retired before he had much of a chance to properly ridicule Trump, who surely would have given him considerable material. In the end, despite the gravity of Pat’s oeuvre and its impact (a shaping of the narrative from a single perspective, which might never be replicated with the current diminishment of the art form), the most potent, eye-opening highlight is just how similar Nixon’s behavior was to current leaders; political climates, corruptions, lies, and envelope-pushing definitely feel cyclical when distilled through the medium of cartoons.

– Mike Massie