Movies you might have missed: Best of Enemies

We are living in a golden age of documentaries. In recent years, the likes of Making a Murderer, The Jinx and The Keepers have enthralled viewers while simultaneously shedding light on important issues. Last year’s American Vandal proved imitation is the sincerest form of flattery with its pitch-perfect combination of incisive spoof and toilet humour.

Best of Enemies (2015, available on Netflix) has not received as much attention as the aforementioned works, but it is an intelligent, hilarious look at a battle of wits and wills between two remarkable men at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The documentary takes a look at the dawn of pundit politics through the prism of the 1968 televised debates between public intellectuals Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr. Buckley was a key conservative figure with a transatlantic accent and a wide vocabulary while Vidal was a novelist with a patrician air and a polemical worldview. The pair could have been specifically designed in a laboratory to rub each other up the wrong way and, in a time long before anyone had heard of the concept of no-platforming, Buckley said Vidal was the one person with whom he would never share a stage in the years prior to 1968.

For better or worse, debate has never been less nuanced than it is half a century on, and people on either side of the political spectrum tend to paint the opposition as ignorant at best and malevolent at worst. Similarly, the notion that essayists and intellectuals could appear on late night talk shows as guests seems inconceivable.

Framed like a heavyweight bout between a couple of prizefighters, this film suggests that while the pair seemed to loathe each other on the surface, deep down they truly despised one another. John Lithgow and Kelsey Grammer provide the off-camera voices for Vidal and Buckley respectively and perhaps, given how funny the film is, it is no surprise that directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville opted for sitcom stars.

Aaron Sorkin has purchased the film rights to the documentary and is reportedly developing a narrative feature from the compelling confrontations – little wonder given his love for verbose but difficult male protagonists.

Best of Enemies took five years to make because of struggles to secure funding, interviews and archival footage, but it was worth the wait. The explosive exchanges became ever more vitriolic and the animosity lingered long after the cameras stopped rolling, while the debates changed the nature of American discourse forever. This is an important and entertaining film that serves as an origin story for debate in the 21st century.