There’s no out-bizarring The Rehearsal, but Paul T. Goldman comes reasonably close. Shot for more than a decade by director Jason Woliner (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), Peacock’s docuseries, released Jan. 1, tells a bonkers true-life tale, as well as a variety of make-believe versions of it, until it hasn’t so much blurred the line between fiction and reality as madly scribbled all over it.
Warning: Some spoilers follow.
“Nobody could make up this shit!” exclaims West Palm Beach, Florida resident Paul T. Goldman, and that’s the first of numerous dubious claims strewn throughout Woliner’s six-episode series (only five of which were provided to press).
Executive-produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Megan Ellison, Paul T. Goldman is the wild and wonky story of its title subject, who reached out to the director in 2012 in the hope that he would turn his personal ordeal into a movie.
Woliner took the bait, and during the ensuing years, he helmed this small-screen genre hybrid, which pivots around Goldman’s bombshell accusation against his wife Audrey Munson: namely, that she was living a double life as a prostitute and madame who, in partnership with her sleazy boyfriend Royce Rocco, was part of an international sex trafficking ring.
Goldman first laid out these charges in his self-published book Duplicity, then in a screenplay based on that tome, and finally in a collection of novels (The Paul T. Goldman Chronicles) that were pure hokum, casting Goldman as a dashing spy on the trail of his enemies. Paul T. Goldman is an adaptation of those source materials, a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of that adaptation, and a non-fiction portrait-cum-examination of Goldman himself.
As far as weirdo protagonists go, Goldman is a doozy. Perpetually bug-eyed, giggling, scrunching his shoulders up in delight, and overselling his every pronouncement in a squeaking voice, he’s a cartoon character come to bizarre docudrama life. The more he tries to behave normally, the more he resembles a fictional creation—specifically, Martin Short failing to act like a human boy in Clifford.
Almost everyone uses aliases in Paul T. Goldman, just as everything presented feels like a trick. It’s difficult to gauge whether this entire affair is a giant put-on, but what is clear is that Goldman believes he’s being a “warrior” rather than a “wimp” by trying to take down his ex-wife, who left him following a brief part-time marriage in which she supposedly spent Wednesday evenings to Saturday mornings in Cocoa Beach caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother.
Chapter 5: The Chronicles of Paul T. Goodman with (l-r) Paul T. Goldman as Paul T. Goldman and Jason Woliner as Jason Woliner.
Peacock
Audrey, it turns out, was Goldman’s second wife, since he’d previously been betrothed to Talia, a mail-order bride that he wed shortly after meeting her in Russia—which he was originally visiting in order to marry a different mail-order bride. Goldman had a son with Talia named Johnny, and his desire to give the boy a new maternal figure was the impetus for shacking up with Audrey, this despite her litany of bizarre demands.
Paul T. Goldman details this saga through a combination of traditional interviews with Goldman and others, dramatic recreations written by and starring Goldman, and clips of those sequences’ production, during which Goldman and Woliner’s relationship comes into view. Goldman is obviously thrilled to have a feature director so committed to bringing his odyssey to the screen.
Harder to pin down, however, is Woliner’s attitude toward Goldman, whom he shows kindness and patience even at the most trying of moments, and yet whom he also treats as a colorful loon and, later, as something closer to a crackpot obsessed with self-serving conspiratorial fantasies about exacting revenge on the woman that abandoned him.
It takes all of three seconds to recognize that Goldman might be the least accomplished actor alive, so Woliner’s decision to humor his psychosis while simultaneously posing as his ally often leaves Paul T. Goldman feeling a bit mean. Then again, Goldman is a grown man who has every right to stop this whenever he wants, and Woliner ostensibly intends this madness to be a character study of delusion, fury, and derangement—all of which is refracted through a cinematic filter.
The series is both revealing and exploitative, segueing between those two modes in the same fashion that it flip-flops between staged and unrehearsed action. Two opposing things always seem to be true at once, and it’s to Woliner’s credit that he keeps pushing the proceedings into ever-stranger corners, with events—and reality itself—folding in on itself until binary distinctions become almost irrelevant.
Goldman repeatedly admits that only an idiot would do what he did; punctuates his remarks with laughably cheesy and awkward zingers; contradicts prior assertions; and presents himself as a noble do-gooder with the evidence to back up his allegations. It’s pretty apparent that he doesn’t have that evidence, but he nonetheless tries to convince private investigators and law enforcement officials to see things from his alternate-universe POV.
Chapter 2: Moscow of Paul T. Goodman with, Paul T. Goldman as Paul T. Goldman.
Peacock
Revelations about fraudulent checks, secret public-park meetings, and covert correspondences are just the tip of this inane iceberg, which is embellished by Goldman’s peculiar and/or insensitive comments about his “hooker” ex-wife. Into this mix, the appearance of legitimate actors in supporting fictionalized parts is one more hilariously odd twist.
There’s plenty to cringe over in Paul T. Goldman, and quite a bit to laugh at too, the funniest being Goldman’s mock public presentation about his ex-wife’s nefariousness in which a paid attendee asks him, “Aren’t mail order brides a form of sex trafficking”—a query that takes the blinded-by-idiocy crusader aback.
Goldman is an eccentric individual who seems to have been absent on the day that they handed out self-awareness, inviting the actual Talia to watch actresses audition to play her, talking to co-stars about his dreams of winning an Emmy, and basking in praise from colleagues about his amazing story. As with Nathan Fielder’s work, it’s a funhouse of legitimate and illusory experiences and compulsions, with Goldman—sad, angry, pitiable and absurd—at its hazy center.
Without having seen its sure-to-be-revelatory finale, one can only speculate about Paul T. Goldman’s ultimate perspective on its main character, whose every action appears to be motivated by hurt, disappointment, and the resultant need to imagine himself as a triumphant genius-hero-savior. What’s not in doubt, though, is that Woliner’s meta-profile is another reflection, and result, of an Internet-addled 21st-century in which everything and nothing is real—a situation only exacerbated by the ubiquitous presence of a camera.
