'Going Clear' review: Alex Gibney tries to clear smoke around Scientology

Scientology has just made itself more interesting than it should be. If the “religion,” as the IRS calls it, would just be more open to criticism, Scientology would not be as vilified as it is. But considering that the religion was created by a paranoid man and is now lead by another paranoid man, Scientology is at a point where it cannot avoid being the target of easy criticism.

The religion is the subject of Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, the latest film from Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. Based on Lawrence Wright’s similarly titled 2013 book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, the film traces the origins of Scientology to how it is structured today.

Gibney divides the film into three distinct sections. First, Gibney takes us into the world of the religion, through interviews with people who have left - including Crash filmmaker Paul Haggis and actor Jason Beghe. They recount how they got into Scientology as a way to help clear their minds and forget about painful memories.

But before we learn how the religion works today, Gibney introduces us to the religion’s founder, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, because the only way to understand Scientology is to understand Hubbard. Through letters from his second wife, Sara, we learn about the foundation of Scientology, which is pretty simple. It’s all about the money. He just wanted to avoid paying taxes while getting rich and the only way to do that was by writing Dianetics and founding his own religion.

When Hubbard died, control of the religion was usurped by David Miscavige, who was raised within Scientology. Miscavige has retained control of the religion through Nazi-like tactics, banning people who speak against Scientology and punishing anyone who does something wrong. He is even accused of personally assaulting members who speak against him.

While there are many other famous members of the religion, Gibney and Wright focus on John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Neither of them agreed to speak, so Gibney is stuck using archival footage of the superstars. (This includes a particularly creepy interview with Cruise recorded by Scientology that features him in a black turtleneck.)

Scientology, of course, issued their expected response to the film. They bashed it, claiming that all the people interviewed know nothing of the religion today. But that doesn’t really hold water, because one woman - who tells a sad story about her own daughter refusing to speak to her - left the church in 2013. Has it really changed that much in less than two years?

Going Clear does suffer from the fact that it does not feature interviews with current Scientologists, but that actually says more about the religion than Gibney’s skills as a documentary filmmaker. Gibney did what he could with the research he had and there are probably even more stories he could have included. At two hours, it still feels like the film is missing something. But it still provides a stunning crash course for Scientology and serves the audience well by focusing on how it affects members, not the crazy Hubbard fiction that inspired it.

'Going Clear' aired on HBO and is available on HBO's On Demand services.