TAKE THIS JOB AND LOVE IT

By RICHARD CORLISS

Life is so short, and work so long, that it's a balm to love what you do. To take pleasure and meaning from work not only gets you through the day-after-day, year-after-year, but it defines your place on this planet as much as anything short of your kids. Yet movies remain fixed on growing-pains farce and lurid fantasy. A distant civilization, judging earthlings from their popular films, would think we are the creatures who cop feels and catch serial killers. They'd never guess we spend something like half our waking hours at work.

Errol Morris' delightful nonfiction film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, is a testimony to the rest of our lives. A one-line summary of the film: it's about four guys who love their jobs. Five if you count Morris, who has built a unique career on his quirky metadocumentaries (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time). He is just the filmmaker to find four kindred spirits, united only in their fascination with pursuits that have something to do with animals. They might be anyone with the genial obsession to get to the office a half-hour early.

Dave Hoover wanted to be a lion tamer ever since he was a kid and saw Clyde Beatty's cheesy jungle movies. George Mendonca went to Rhode Island after the hurricane of '38 and stayed to become a topiary gardener. Ray Mendez, a photographer, had a high school fascination with insects; 20 years later, he learned that there were mammals--naked mole rats--living in colonies like insects, took photos of them, brought them home. Rodney Brooks is an M.I.T. scientist who loved to build things; now he makes robots whose movements are not programmed but follow the machine's "nature."

The names of these men are shown only briefly at the start. For the rest of the film they are identified by their eccentric clothing (Ray's plaid shirt and butterfly bow tie) or coiffure (Dave's gravity-defying orange comb-over). And they are defined by their jobs; we think of them simply as "the lion tamer" or "the mole-rat guy," and watch their eyes spark as they speak of the work that lights their lives.

To have a vocation means to have patience. "It took me 15 years to build a bear," says George of one of his arboreal sculptures. "I won't live long enough to build another bear like that one." Like carpenters and shoemakers, George represents a dying breed of quiet artisanship. And Dave represents the veteran worker who, having devoted himself to perfection on the job, must eventually give way, training his young, flashier female replacement.

Morris beautifully orchestrates the four stories (helped by Caleb Sampson's music, which gaily purloins motifs from Nino Rota and Philip Glass). The film blends interview and location footage with clips from old movies and Super 8, black and white and color. As the styles merge, so do the stories. The real lions, the leaf elephants, the robot insects and the insectoid rodents overlap, abut, merge in a gorgeous fugue of hard work and abiding love. This is a funny, thrilling tribute to people's urge to find play and profundity in the work they do.

--By Richard Corliss