Starring Jerry as Himself: Docudrama Spotlights Elder Abuse of a Grimly Common Sort

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

The unusual narrative device described as a “docufiction hybrid” at the heart of Starring Jerry as Himself is at once clever and heartbreaking.

The film follows Jerry Hsu, a Taiwanese immigrant who for decades has lived and worked as an engineer in Florida, where he and wife Kathy raised their three sons.

When we meet the family, Jonathan, Jesse, and Joshua Hsu are adults busy with their own lives. Jerry — now retired, approaching 70, and unhappily divorced from Kathy — spends a lot of time alone.

One day, Jerry receives a telephone call from men claiming to be high-ranking Chinese officials investigating an international money laundering scheme. They suggest Jerry is somehow involved and needs to cooperate with their probe both to eliminate himself from suspicion and to help them nab the bad guys.

Help mainly involves Jerry sending large sums of money to the callers, who alternately threaten Jerry with deportation if he refuses while seeming to befriend him and, crucially, making him feel needed, a valued operative in their orbit. As Jerry says at one point, he feels “like a spy, like 007.” The callers claim they will send the money back.

Jerry’s family, though suspicious of the endless calls he is suddenly, covertly taking, is unaware that he is draining his retirement fund and stock portfolio until the day that Jerry is unable to produce the down payment he has promised to loan Jesse for a condo purchase. And then, the Chinese “officials” stop answering Jerry’s calls.

All hell breaks loose, and the blame game begins when it is discovered that lonely, gullible Jerry has been the victim of an elaborate but depressingly common scam that has strip-mined his life’s savings, detonating the legacy he had hoped to leave to his sons.

Starring Jerry as Himself literally does star Jerry, a real person and fraud victim, who re-enacts the sequence of events that ultimately led to his penury.

In the film, the scammers are portrayed as Jerry imagines them: a small group of uniformed, coordinated, disciplined, and legitimate-sounding men working from a headquarters overseas. Jerry imagines the concerned staffer at his local bank — suspicious of his elderly client’s large money transfers and asking lots of questions — as an evil doer he must work valiantly against.

Jerry’s son Jonathan Hsu is the film’s producer, and the family members also appear as themselves in re-enactments and later, post-scam, in more straightforward documentary style. It’s a surprisingly impactful way to tell this story, mostly because Jerry is incredibly sympathetic and rather a good actor. The outspoken, larger-than-life Kathy, meanwhile, is very amusing.

Ironically, Jerry’s downfall led to the making of the film which helped him realize an unfulfilled dream: to write and act. It’s a bittersweet conclusion, but one not without some redemption, especially considering the epilogue, which grimly notes that American seniors lose more than $3 billion annually to phone scammers. It’s a tragedy repeating the world over.

Starring Jerry as Himself won the Jury and Audience Documentary Awards at the 2023 Slamdance Film Festival. No surprise. Viewers get to know gentle, trusting Jerry, and feel outrage at his pain.

Starring Jerry as Himself. Directed by Law Chen. Written by Law Chen and Jerry Hsu. With Jerry Hsu, Kathy Hsu, Jonathan Hsu, Jesse Hsu and Joshua Hsu. Available on VOD and digital November 8.