Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Despite its gag-like title and its riddle-like premise -- what do a topiary gardener, a robot engineer, a mole-rat expert and a lion tamer have in common? -- Errol Moris's exhilarating and original new Fast, Cheap & Out of Control says a lot more about the human place in the universe than his ponderous A Brief History of Time. Interweaving and paralleling the lives, work obsessions and eccentricities of his four unlikely subjects (much credit is due his editors, especially Karen Schmeer), Morris has achieved the cinematic equivalent of a Bach fugue, delightful in its wit and intricacies and, in the end, spiritually elevating.

Any one of the four alone would have made a fascinating film. Rodney Brooks, the MIT-based robot designer, exudes sheer exuberance in just being able to put gadgets together and get them to move, and his cute six-legged creations mirror his delight in their cartoon-character antics (a paper he co-wrote proposing to explore space with thousands of inexpensive robots gives the film its title). Equally childlike is Ray Mendez, who makes environments to study the mole rat, a hairless burrow-dwelling rodent that may be the only mammal with antlike social behavior.

Sadder are the older George Mendonça, who tends a garden filled with animal-shaped topiary, and retired trainer Dave Hoover, who reminisces about his favorite lions, now toothless and with cloudy eyes -- neither foresees his life's work surviving him. The arcana of their trades are rapturously photographed as the film dances from machines that look like insects to animals that act like them, from topiary shaped into beasts to beasts shaped into a kind of topiary. In its search for the nature and likely survival of humanity, Fast Cheap & Out of Control revels in that essence of what it is to be human -- a sense of play. Opens Friday at the Avon.

-- Peter Keough