This review appears in a font called Geneva, like all the reviews on this site, unless you don't have that font installed or you're smart enough to override my font choices. Second choice is Arial, a font I like despite the disdain of typographers and certain beloved fellow film reviewers. I know you have Arial installed, but if you dislike Arial enough, you might be seeing it in my third choice: Neue Haas Grotesk, a font designed in 1957 at the Haas type foundry in Munchenstein, which is better known as Helvetica and is the subject of this documentary directed by Gary Huswit.

We see it everywhere, even if we don't know what it's called. As the film demonstrates, it's in the logos of countless companies, and it's on countless posters and advertisements. It's become the default font of advertising; some (well, some nutters) consider it the official font of imperialism. It's loved by many, hated by at least a handful of people (but not as much as certain other fonts). There's enough material here for an engaging, witty, revealing short documentary about this particularly popular font, its origins and its current place in typography and graphic design. However, the desire to achieve feature length caused the filmmakers to pad their 25 minutes of screen time with endless montages of signs featuring Helvetica (but even though I'm not a typographer, I know that many of the signs depicted were in fonts other than Helvetica, so what's with that, anyway?); repetitive interviews with various graphic designers, most of whose contributions can be summarized by the statement "I really love/hate Helvetica... there's just something special/awful about it"; and sometimes interminable digressions into minutia or off-topic anecdotes that do little to expand the aforementioned statement about how great/terrible Helvetica is.

The finished product is curiously devoid of historical context. We're told over and over about how crappy pre-1950s design was, all cluttered with cartoons and hand lettering and multiple fonts and smokestacks belching smoke and exclamation points—all of the things that I love about early advertising. Helvetica swept all that away with its cleanness of design and its modern look. And the film is admittedly packed to the gills with information about the history of this particular font. But what about the rest? I'm talking, as you know, about serifs. It would seem that the Times family of fonts is much more common in printed materials, and the documentary barely mentions the idea of serifs, let alone the differences between serif and non-serif fonts, or the situations in which one might use one or the other class. I understand the filmmakers' desire to focus mostly on their beloved font, but their film is a little like a study of the American Civil War that discusses the Confederacy without mentioning the Union.

The interviews range from the intriguing to the irrelevant. Erik Spiekerman, a renowned typographer who would rather look at fonts than girls' bottoms, despises Helvetica and is happy to tell us exactly why. Michael Bierut, who provides the most energetic interview of the film, also provides all that gorgeous imagery of the old-school letterhead with smokestacks belching filth onto the page. He loves Helvetica, and he's passionate enough about typography that I'd hate to argue with him about it. It was great fun to see Hermann Zapf, creator of the eponymous Dingbats that plague yard-sale signs the world over. But others, whose names escape me because they didn't have anything interesting or helpful to say, didn't—well, you get the point. They talked and took up screen time, but succeeded only in giving the film's wheels another spin.

On the way home in the subway, I saw a poster for Good Luck Chuck, a film you'll never see reviewed here, but not because its poster used Helvetica. Well, not just because of that.

—September 25, 2007