REVIEWS IN BRIEF, FEBRUARY 2016: DOCUMENTARIES

Being a collection of capsule reviews of some of the non-fiction films watched by the blogger in recent weeks

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The Pearl Button (Guzmán, 2015)

Septuagenarian documentary god Patricio Guzmán scored an enormous triumph with 2010's Nostalgia for the Light, one of the most important and under-seen films of the decade. Two things are thus unsurprising: that Nostalgia's 2015 companion piece, The Pearl Button, would fail to match the same heights; and that The Pearl Button would still be a hell of a fine achievement in its own right, re-directing Nostalgia's impulses into new, if familiar channels that result in a wholly new set of observations about the idea of nationhood and the relationship of humans with their cultural past.

Whereas Nostalgia was a film about the desert, The Pearl Button is ultimately a film about water, and it would be worth every minute even if the movie offered only the pleasure of seeing how Guzmán and cinematographer Katell Djian framed and shaped images of water flowing, crashing, dripping, and gently ebbing. The film is as much a meditation on its themes as a discussion of them, and the accumulation of water images is one of the most successfully meditative things about it.

Water is not just a visual motif but a philosophical one, as well; even spiritual, maybe, in Guzmán's conception. In focusing on the human inhabitants of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, including the last vestiges of the pre-Columbian language users in that part of South America, The Pearl Button naturally focuses on how life on an island is shaped by the sea, from which resources and invaders alike both come. The title itself is a dual reference to Jemmy Button of the Yaghan people, who was trotted around England in the 1830s (and who returned to Tierra del Fuego on the same voyage of the HMS Beagle that brought young naturalist Charles Darwin to prominence), as well as to a button found wedged in the rails used to weight down the bodies sent to drown during Augusto Pinochet's reign, a pair of historical grace notes that both suggest the worst in human behavior, but The Pearl Button takes a more pacific than nihilistic view of the flow of history, even if Guzmán's ultimate theme is to warn us of the history and identity that risk being lost as time marches on.

Starting with Guzmán's own narration, warm and quasi-mystical, The Pearl Button is generally more of a series of reflections than anything analytically focused, and it lacks Nostalgia for the Light's keen sense of specific outrage; even when the film tries its damnedest to address specific question of Chile's tendency to swallow up its own past, The Pearl Button keeps drifting into Big Questions about human civilisations more generally. Speaking privately, I wouldn't have it any other way; one of the privileges of old age is the ability to take the long view, and Guzmán's generous diagnosis of human failing makes for a truly moving and ingenious film even if it lacks the sharp focus or political edge of his best work.

8/10

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3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets (Silver, 2015)

I think, as a general principal, that it's hard for a documentary focused on discussing living political problems to be aesthetically interesting at a very high level, which is one of the reasons I don't tend to care for agitprop documentaries, and why I institute my "is this more interesting than a magazine story on the same topic?" test. But sometimes you can have your cake and eat it, and to prove the point, here comes 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets. It is, on the one hand, a sickeningly potent case study of one particular murder of a young African-American male by a freaked-out white dude with a gun, and the broken judicial system that permits crimes like that to go unpunished. But it's also a tense, engaging piece of narrative that performs the ultimate trick of a great documentary, by teasing its arguments out through the viewer's own thought processes rather than hauling out talking heads and authority figures to tell us what to think.

The film's subject is the 2012 shooting of Jordan Davis, 17 years old when he was killed by 45-year-old Michael Dunn in Jacksonville, Florida, the end point of an altercation that started over loud music Davis and his friends were playing as they were filling up their car at the same gas station as Dunn. Nobody involved disputed that Dunn fired the bullets; the case hinged on whether or not Dunn's actions were justified under the state's stand-your-ground law (more notoriously invoked in another 2012 killing, the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin).

Director Marc Silver takes it as a given that Davis represented no actual threat to Dunn, and invites us to be suitably outraged, but that's not really what 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets is about. It is a kind of weird courtroom drama, one that unfurls very slowly and without explaining what's going on - we have to piece together what the crime was to begin with, let alone who the principles were and what specific events took place. It's asking the audience to be a combination of detective and jurist, encountering information and sifting through it and figuring out what it means (Silver took notes from The Thin Blue Line, clearly), never taking as its subject the question of whether Dunn is morally culpable for Davis's death, which it assumes, but whether the wriggliness of the stand-your-ground laws means that Dunn is legally culpable.

Different viewers will undoubtedly piece together those data points in different ways, but the effect is near enough to the same thing: 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets is not confronting the problem of middle-aged white men being made nervous and uncomfortable by the mere existence of black teenagers, but the problem of how that discomfort has been codified into law. And it gets there not by haranguing us, nor by lecturing, but by presenting reality in the form of a narrative thriller that lets the arbitrary injustice of these most toxic of laws cast real doubt onto the question of whether Dunn can be found guilty of a crime.

It's one of the best films about the current wave of racially-motivated crimes I've seen, only slightly undercut by its dreadfully leading, saccharine score, and its mission drift as it goes on; the final scenes unpersuasively suggest that (SPOILER ALERT FOR REALITY) we should feel uplift from the fact that Dunn was imprisoned for his crimes, even though the problem it so piercingly identified wasn't "this one white guy flipped out and killed a kid" but "this is merely a symptom of a society-wide problem with laws effectively making it okay to murder African-American men because you never know", and that is a thread that Silver almost forgets about by the end. But whatever. The missteps are little, and the brilliance with which the film combines righteous outrage and smart film construction are enough to make this a thoroughly essential piece of the documentarian's art.

9/10

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What Happened, Miss Simone? (Garbus, 2015)

There is a tradition in documentary filmmaking, I do not know what we should call it: the work of archivist-interviewers, perhaps. Even if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you've seen it: there are talking heads who explain stuff, and there is vintage footage of the stuff they're explaining, and sometimes they're talking over it, but sometimes not. It is the format of all those PBS American Masters episodes, and of basically every historically-oriented TV show ever; it is essentially boring and mostly inartistic, but it's still very good at doing one thing: explaining a topic and then demonstrating it. It is the way we learn things from documentaries. And What Happened, Miss Simone? just so happens to be about as close as I can imagine to the perfect version of that form; a biographical sketch so scintillating and authoritative that I barely registered how stylistically generic it was.

The film is Liz Garbus's supremely confident portrait of Nina Simone, a woman who mixed groundbreaking musical genius with fiery radical politics, and is generally one of the most fascinating, difficult icons of the American Civil Rights Movement that you could hope to find. Garbus presents her story in exactly the way you'd expect: footage progressing in chronological fashion from Simone's earliest days as a burgeoning star, to her roaring invocations of Black nationalism in the '60s and '70s, to her years of restful decline in France. The footage is immaculately well-chosen, presenting a full range of Simone's career and character in her own voice; purely as a collection of archival materials, this is everything that 2015's other major musician bio-doc, Amy, was too narrowly-focused to be.

But What Happened, Miss Simone? isn't just about old footage, and it's possibly in the newer interview footage that the film shifts from being a deeply satisfying record of Simone's career to a borderline-essential reckoning with her artistic legacy. It becomes very clear, the more interviewees we meet, what a complex, grandiose figure Simone was to those who knew her, beyond any one person's ability to grapple with all the facets of her personality. The most poignant interview subject is undoubtedly her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, who executive-produced the film and uses it neither to lionise her mother nor condemn her in so much tawdry gossip, but instead struggles towards comprehend how to reconcile Nina's musical gift, her passionate and possibly dangerously overwrought politics, and the at times ice-cold cruelty she levied upon her daughter, the one person upon whom she could transfer all the abuse she received herself.

Gossiping about an abusive mom is no more the film's goal than canonising Simone as a plaster saint; this is as earnest an attempt as can be attempted in 100 minutes to fully grasp the twists and turns inside the mind of a mercurial genius, for good and great and ill. If it never quite finds space to fully demonstrate Simone's musical career beyond a tour of her greatest hits, and rushes through her retirement years with unenlightening speed, the very least that What Happened, Miss Simone? does is to make an ironclad case that as a human being, Simone was as fascinatingly jam-packed with ideas and furies as anyone in the 20th Century, and is well worth getting to know better.

8/10

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Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (Afineevsky, 2015)

Maidan exists. This is the reality that Winter on Fire, Netflix's Oscar-nominated documentary about the February, 2014 revolution in Ukraine, has to contend with and never manages to overcome. It's an unfair thing to demand of any film that it has to live up to the standard of some other specific film, I concede, and perhaps to the viewer who'd never seen or heard of Maidan, Sergei Loznitsa's 2014 vérité-style snapshot of the situation on the ground in Ukraine would be more inclined to find Evgeny Afineevsky's take on the material to be more satisfying and intellectually stimulating than I'm able to.

Also, maybe not. Just in reference solely to itself and the material it explores, Winter on Fire is a tangibly lightweight compendium of interviews with a wide range of protesters set up in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the famed Independence Square of Kyiv. It captures something that does make it unmistakably valuable as a snapshot of a historical moment: the righteous anger of the protesters, who felt with considerable justification that they were being sold out by their elected government, which was at that time about to reject a potential path into the Eurozone. As journalism, the act of gathering these narratives into one place is of obviously clear value.

But that's the starting point of journalism, not the end, and this is where Winter on Fire comes up miserably short. All of this is plainly meant to serve as an explanation not just of the specific feelings of a dozen or so Ukrainians, all of them indelibly captured by Afineevsky's camera (the clear standout: a little urchin boy who initially joined the protesters because of the possibility of getting medical attention. But several of the onscreen interviewees emerge with rich, interesting lives that we see around the edges); this is also a film with an eye to explaining the politics of the protests, and here the film is a complete flop. It presents a hopelessly crimped, worm's-eye-view of a very difficult international situation, one that has been treated with appallingly trivial analysis in the U.S newsmedia, at any rate, and having a glossy magazine sidebar approach to that material - let alone setting it on the path to one of cinema's most prestigious awards - is hardly good for anybody. The film's up-with-people feel-goodism is charming and pleasant and all, but it's simply not engaged with its subject in a rewarding way.

So back to Maidan. That film didn't really go into any depths that this one doesn't, but it signally lacked the pretense of doing so: it was an attempt to capture reality for a stretch of time. Winter on Fire, with its carefully assembled cast of figures, is an attempt to simplify reality, and it turns out far more superficial than its subject, along with the footage captured and assembled here, deserve.

6/10

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Cartel Land (Heineman, 2015)

Apparently, all it takes to get a Best Documentary Feature nomination at the Oscars is to stop at "we've got the footage!" without advancing to the necessary step of "we've formulated an argument with our footage!", because now we come along to Cartel Land, a film that had every excuse to be one of the year's non-fiction masterpieces, and simply refuses to make the hard choices that would seal the deal. The access that director Matthew Heineman had to his subjects is astonishing and eye-opening, and even in an utterly hobbled form, Cartel Land is essential viewing for anybody with any concerns about the violence of the Mexican drug industry. But that access seems to have cowed Heineman into packaging this material in an alarmingly banal form, with little to no interest in actually interrogating the people he was filming, either in person or in the editing room.

The film focuses on two very different groups with similar goals: in Michoacán, Mexico, Dr. José Mireles, a leader of one of the region's Autodefensas, grassroots vigilante groups fighting against the cartels in the face of governmental inability to anything worth a damn; while in the United States, Tim "Nailer" Foley leads the Arizona Border Recon, also a vigilante group, working hard to make sure that nobody crosses the U.S./Mexico border illegally. Including cartel members and their shipments of narcotics, but there's no real indication that "Nailer" would care about his job any less if he was only stopping routine illegal immigrants. This is one of those points that Heineman is fine with letting slide by without any meaningful intellectual engagement.

The footage gathered in Cartel Land by Heineman and his co-cinematographer Matt Porwoll is never less than astonishing, and one can only imagine the personal danger faced by Heineman and Porwoll in pursuing it. Actually, one doesn't need to imagine anything - Cartel Land is more than willing to share with us footage of the wanton violence meted out by the cartels on the vigilantes and the vigilantes on the cartels. It's certainly hard to fault the filmmakers for their bravery, or the unblinking, visceral intensity with which they set us right inside life as constant combat and tension between the bad guys and the guys who are not bad primarily because they're at least failing to materially profit from the sales of drugs. It's all enough to make Sicario look like a mildly unpleasant afternoon stroll.

And yet, as that viscera piles up, there's much less meaning to all of us this than meets the eye. The film obviously wants us to take it as a variation on the question, "can barbaric violence be fought with barbarism?", and I suppose its not not that. But Heineman gets awfully carried away by the vigilantes he's embedded with, and the end result is a film that makes this constant mortal dread seem at least as much stimulating as it is draining. I won't go so far as to call Cartel Land drug war porn, but it's awkwardly besotted with the material it's depicting, and a little bit of critical distance could surely only have helped make this is a real discussion of the issues, not just a vivid depiction of them.

7/10

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In Jackson Heights (Wiseman, 2015)

Another year, another multi-hour Frederick Wiseman epic: and I actually quite liked In Jackson Heights, so forgive me for sounding a bit dismissive. But it comes in a hair short of his last two films, lacking the precision of National Gallery's deceptively dense argument, or the sheer society-encompassing grandeur of At Berkeley, still the best of his films that I've seen. In fact, In Jackson Heights has something I've never seen in a Wiseman film before: scenes that go on longer than they need to.

But who am I to tell one of the all-time geniuses in the field how to go about his business? Slightly imperfect or not, In Jackson Heights is still one of the great American documentaries of 2015, with a timely awareness of society's ills that proves that the 85-year-old director hasn't lost any of his insight into what makes his country tick. The film's setting is Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, one of the nation's most diverse neighborhoods, and Wiseman appears to have set himself to the task of capturing as many of the individual cultures and languages to be found there as his highly depersonalised observational style could manage.

It's a rich cross-section of humanity that emerges, from skin color to sexuality to philosophy. Nor is it an entirely rosy, optimistic portrait: in one of the film's few openly editorial beats, Wiseman cuts from a middle-aged white woman talking about how grateful she is to have the police always there protecting her beloved neighborhood, to a group of transgender Latino women sharing stories about being targeted and abused by those same police.

Still, if there's one overriding feeling that emerges from the material, it's pleasure at the thought this many wholly unique and individual ways of existing in the world can all commingle in one physical place. Wiseman's films, famously, tend to focus on institutions: high schools, mental hospitals, police departments, universities, zoos, always with specific instances standing in for national (at times international) concerns. In Jackson Heights follows the latter half of this tendency: the neighborhood is both itself and the embodiment of something greater. In this case, Wiseman shifts focus to explore, not a human institution, but a concept: what it means to have a community. "The most diverse neighborhood in New York", in this case, is a means of getting us to "a place where many different kinds of people care for each other", and the best moments of In Jackson Heights center on the ways that different individuals and groups act protectively to the weaker and those in need: a traveling prayer group stopping in the middle of a sidewalk to comfort a woman on her way to meet with a dying relative, a support group in which trans women share stories and strategies for coping with the petty meanness of the world, and countless other little moments of one human extending their hand to another. If, in pursuing this theme, In Jackson Heights errs on the side of fuzziness and indulgent editing, those are suggestive more of warmth and affection rather than sloppy filmmaking, for that warmth is the very heart and soul of this movie.

9/10