→ November 16, 2018
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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

No story has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it’s over. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ spent about a decade on his last film project, The Other Side of the Wind, but never completed it before his death in 1985, having shot the film for over five years and spent several more editing it, or simply tinkering with it, before he lost the rights to the footage in a legal dispute. Netflix has commissioned a completion of the film with what was shot, in line with what’s known of Welles’ plans, as well as a companion documentary about the making of the original project called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The former film holds little interest to me, for many reasons, but the documentary is one of the most purely entertaining things I’ve seen all year. Morgan Neville, who also had a hit this year with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, spoke to just about everyone involved in the making of The Other Side of the Wind who is still alive, used archival footage from others, footage from the movie itself, plus recorded interviews with Welles and bits of his other films to create an informative and fast-paced look at a slow-moving cinematic disaster.

The documentary covers the period from when he began the project on The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 through the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which, for reasons explained in the documentary, cost Welles control of his project, with a quick run through the last few years of Welles’ life and some of the other projects he left unfinished. Welles appears to have had a general vision for the movie, which was itself a film-within-a-film and had a clearly autobiographical bent that he repeatedly denied, but the script and that vision kept changing, while Welles, strapped for cash, kept improvising on matters of location, crew, and even cast. He tried to use impressionist Rich Little in the film, and later cast a local waitress with no acting experience (or, it would appear, talent) in an important supporting role. He tried to work with a skeleton crew of people especially loyal to him, but the set is described by surviving members as “a circus” where it was often unclear why Welles was doing what he was doing, or if he even knew.

Welles comes off as a narcissist and megalomaniac who openly lies to his cast and crew to avoid any admission that things weren’t going well. He was also a perfectionist, in the worst way that can be, in that he couldn’t bear to let films go, leaving at least four projects unfinished at his death — this one, The Deep (an adaptation of the novel Dead Calm), The Dreamers, and Welles’ adaptation of Don Quixote. The perfectionism meant that scenes were reshot and rewritten many times, often on the fly, while the editing process also took years as Welles, in the retelling of people who worked with him, altered his vision for the film as he edited it – while doing so as a squatter in the house of director Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’ friend and one of the stars of the film.

The documentary doesn’t so much address the question of why the movie wasn’t finished – that’s straightforward – or what Welles hoped to accomplish with the movie beyond making his magnum opus, which is unanswerable. It seems more a study of Welles the character, a man undone by a massive early success in Citizen Kane, subsequent betrayals by Hollywood, a lack of contemporary acclaim for later works – many now seen as great films, as his entire legacy has undergone a total reassessment since his death – and strained personal relationships. There’s even a hint at the end of They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead that Welles’ upbringing played a substantial part in his perfectionism and constant need for approbation, although it’s underexplored, likely because there was no one to interview on camera about it. Instead, Neville seems to ask this question about The Other Side of the Wind: Did Welles ruin his own movie or did the movie ruin him?

The film also includes vignettes from Welles’ personal life in the 1970s and early 1980s that both flesh out (no pun intended) his character while further explaining, or trying to explain, the endless story of the making of his movie. That includes the story of Welles’ friendship with Bogdanovich, which ended, per Bogdanovich’s telling, when Welles and Burt Reynolds mocked him during a television appearances; his longstanding affair with Oja Kador, a Croatian artist and actress who also starred in his film; and his extensive working relationship with cameraman Gary Graver, which crossed into the abusive. Those three relationships were essential both to the making of The Other Side of the Wind and its unmaking as well, as there is no way Welles would have fallen so far down this rabbit hole were it not for the devotion he inspired in his friends and colleagues.

Neville uses some quirky devices to keep the pacing brisk, especially at the beginning, such as using clips of Welles from his films to create a false dialogue with the narrator, Alan Cummings, something that I found amusing but is certainly atypical for serious documentaries. There’s also a clip of his wonderful appearance in The Muppet Movie, likely the first appearance of Welles I ever saw, which forever cemented his image for me as a hefty, silver-bearded man with a deep voice and great charisma on the screen. As it turns out, Welles had a spectacular sense of humor as well, which comes across as a side effect in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead; he had a huge laugh and a quick, dry wit, never evident in his films but very much a part of his persona and likely a reason people in his orbit were so willing to throw their lives into chaos when he called. I can’t say anything here made me more interested in seeing The Other Side of the Wind, but it did remind me of how much I enjoyed his work behind the camera (The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil) and in front of it – especially The Third Man, a film so good that for years I assumed he directed it.

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→ October 9, 2018
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Dark Money.

The documentary Dark Money, now airing free on PBS after it received very positive reviews at Sundance this spring, focuses primarily on a very specific case of electoral manipulation in Montana, where the Koch brothers used various 501(c)(4) front groups – “social welfare” nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors – to flood districts with misleading or fraudulent materials in the last 30 days before elections. Montana’s history of restrictive campaign finance laws and tradition of citizen legislators makes it the ideal environment to expose these methods, which are at least subversive and unethical even when they’re not illegal, but a system designed to thwart such manipulation still wasn’t enough to stop it or make it easier to detect or fight. And, as the filmmakers show throughout the story, what happened in Montana is increasingly happening elsewhere, with the Koch brothers in particular behind much of it in their fights to eliminate labor unions, demonize public education, and gut environmental regulations on businesses. It’s horrifying, and Dark Money makes it clear that we the people have few if any tools available to stop it.

Dark Money largely follows the work of an investigative reporter named John S. Adams, who was let go when the state’s largest newspaper group shuttered its office covering state affairs and decided to start working on this case on his own. In several elections for the state legislature, candidates found themselves targeted by mailers that included inflammatory and often false claims, but were unable to effectively respond to them because they arrived at voters’ houses so late – and because responding would have required campaign funds they didn’t have. These mailers came from ‘dark money’ groups, nonprofits with innocuous names who don’t have to disclose their funders’ identities and in many cases don’t exist beyond a PO Box. Adams, with the help of some of the targeted candidates (many of whom were Republicans who were primaried from the right by candidates aided by dark money groups) and eventually some volunteer attorneys who helped the state build its case against one legislator, did his best to follow the money, and with some good fortune was eventually able to show that the Koch group Americans for Prosperity was behind the mailers. The film follows one specific case, against Republican Art Wittich, for accepting illegal contributions from the National Right to Work Committee, which is largely funded by the Koch brothers. The group has even continued meddling in Montana elections past the court case and timeline covered in the documentary.

Filmmaker Kim Reed does a superb job generalizing the case to constituencies beyond Montana, including showing how the Koch brothers and affiliated groups helped rig the recall election of Scott Walker and stack the Wisconsin Supreme Court with allies who shut down a state investigation into the Walker campaign’s finances. The IRS regulation on 501(c)(4) groups, which are categorized as “social welfare” organizations, is one major obstacle to allowing voters to know who’s funding those mailers or donating to political candidates. Another is the emasculation of the Federal Election Commission that began under Don McGahn, who joined the FEC with two other Republicans and made a pact to always vote in a bloc that effectively prevented the Commission from doing anything, killing the group’s authority to adjudicate in cases of campaign finance violations. (The FEC, by design, is a six-member panel, with three commissioners from each party, and thus is prone to 3-3 ties along party lines.)

And the third, of course, is the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC, where the Court ruled 5-4 that corporate donations to political campaigns were protected speech under the First Amendment – thus arguing that corporations, which are legal entities, have the same free speech rights as people. (Corporations primarily exist in law as a way to shield investors or owners from many forms of legal liability; they also enjoy different tax benefits from individuals, and also allow owners to gain from economies of scale not available to smaller entities. Corporations may act as individuals in the economic sphere, but they are not individual actors in the political space, or at least were not until Citizens United.) The rise of dark money also has created the possibility or even likelihood that foreign corporations or governments are funding American political campaigns; who’s to say that Chinese companies or the Russian or North Korean governments aren’t funding American Tradition Partnership or other front groups that support mostly conservative candidates who have agreed to reduce or eliminate regulations in exchange for campaign support?

There is so much to infuriate voters in Dark Money; even if you agree with these astroturfing groups’ policy aims, do you really agree with their methods? Should campaign funding be untraceable? Should there be consequences for sending out fliers with misleading or false statements against candidates? To what extent should corporate money be involved in politics when, as described in the documentary, those candidates will in turn vote on matters like environmental regulations where the interests of the companies funding candidates do not align with those of voters (assuming voters like clean water)? One of the many examples in the film that serves as a microcosm for the increasingly dirty, toxic atmosphere of our body politic is when the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity holds a “town hall” meeting, promising voters they can ask a specific candidate why he’s supporting Obamacare or voting certain ways on issues … but didn’t invite the candidate himself, despite using his name and image on fliers advertising the event. The candidate shows up, and the group’s director, Zach Lahn (now involved in a Koch-funded primary school in Wichita, despite having no background in education) claims he left the candidate “two messages,” and then tells a voter that he didn’t lie about the event because he used a “different definition of town hall.” Our rights are at stake, and we don’t know who’s paying for the information that shows up in our mailboxes, or to whom the names on the ballot might be beholden once they’re elected. Even if you don’t care about the methods used to get the candidates you think you want in office elected, once they’re there, they may be voting for a lot of things you didn’t know they’d support. Dark Money is the ultimate cautionary tale as our republic’s foundations begin to crack.

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→ October 2, 2018
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Love, Gilda.

Readers above a certain age will react one way to the mention of Gilda Radner’s name; readers below it will likely react less effusively, if at all. I’m above the line – I remember Radner’s brief, soaring peak as an unlikely television star in a male-dominated field, a fearless performer with impeccable timing and a gift for physical comedy, without whom Saturday Night Live might not have survived into adolescence and whose trailblazing work paved the way for dozens of women in comedy in the ensuing three decades. Now first-time director and former Gilda’s Club volunteer Lisa D’Apolito has memorialized Radner’s life in a new documentary, Love, Gilda, that relies heavily on source material from Radner herself, including journals, letters, audio recordings, and home videos, to give a simple, straightforward biography of a woman who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of women in comedy.

Relying heavily on those original materials from Radner, including recordings she made while writing her autobiography It’s Always Something (released just two weeks after her death at 43 of ovarian cancer), Love, Gilda gives viewers a window into why Radner, who grew up in relative privilege in Detroit, chose a life in comedy, and how she coped (or didn’t) with her sudden ascent to stardom after she joined the original cast of Saturday Night Live in 1975. This is a true biography in that it starts with Radner’s birth, detailing her upbringing, her close relationship with her father (who died when she was 12 of a brain tumor), a solid but flawed relationship with her mother (who obsessed over Radner’s weight and perceived unattractiveness as a child), her grandmother Dibby who served as a second mother of sorts and inspired the character Emily Litella, and how Radner started to find her acting and comedic voice as she grew up. Why this particular woman became known as one of the funniest comedians on the planet and anchored a subversive, late-night TV show that was dominated by men on both sides of the camera, is itself enough fodder for a documentary, and it’s the question that Love, Gilda answers best.

The film is framed by clips of several modern, highly successful comedians reading from Radner’s notes and journals, expressing a few stray thoughts of their own on Radner’s influence, but within the body of the film anything that isn’t from Radner herself is from people who worked with her. Several of the most important figures from her tenure on Saturday Night Live appear, all replete with praise for her comedic genius and the way she confronted institutional sexism by working harder and carving out a place for herself in a show dominated by men. It’s a bit incongruous in today’s environment, where the her approach to this sort of patriarchical workplace seems dated, but the film at least implies that for the time period she was a revolutionary.

Her time on SNL was marked by that sudden rise to fame, to the point where she was frequently recognized on the street (about which she had mixed feelings), as well as tumultuous romances with fellow cast members, notably Bill Murray. (D’Apolito reached out to Murray and over 100 other people for the film, but most didn’t respond. Chevy Chase is the only male SNL castmate of Radner’s to appear in the documentary.) Gene Wilder, Radner’s widow, is a major character in the last third of the film, but D’Apolito chose not to use any footage of her conversations with him before his death in 2016 because he was already unwell at the time.

I have two quibbles with Love, Gilda, but neither is the more common criticism about the relative paucity of clips of her work. One is that her struggles with mental illness – mostly depression, but certainly hints of anxiety, and then a diagnosed eating disorder that led to a hospitalization – are insufficiently covered, including what aspects of her upbringing may have contributed to all of this. (There’s a brief mention of her mom & pediatrician putting her on an amphetamine to try to control her weight, but it gets little follow-up.) The narrative technique of relying almost entirely on Radner’s writings seemed ideal for delving further into this subject, since Radner mentioned feeling neurotic and depressed, as well as expressing concerns about her appearance, quite a bit even in the journal entries and letters the film presents to us. There’s also no mention of what effect, if any, the public revelations about her eating disorder by authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad in 1986 – I’d argue that they ‘outed’ her – might have had on her.

The second quibble, perhaps more than just that word implies, is the lack of a real discussion of Radner’s legacy as one of the first women to break through the gender barrier in comedy. Carol Burnett preceded her, to name one, but there weren’t many women who became stars in their own right before Radner did; Radner was the first breakout star from SNL, and declined a chance to lead her own variety show on NBC in 1979 (a point omitted from the film). The filmmakers got Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Melissa McCarthy on camera to read some of Radner’s notes and offer a thought or two, but more from them, or from Radner’s contemporaries like Laraine Newman (who also appears) or Jane Curtin (who doesn’t), to try to place Radner’s impact in some context, even if it tended towards the hagiographic, would have been helpful. Love, Gilda simply assumes you know how important she was, and tells her life story in simple terms, which is fine but will be lost on younger viewers who have few or no memories of Radner’s work or popularity before her early death.

The film’s minimal reliance on clips of Radner’s work, assumed in other reviews to be a result of the filmmakers’ unwillingness or inability to pay for the rights, didn’t faze me, because I’ve seen so much of her SNL work and most of her best clips are available online anyway. I didn’t watch this film to stroll down memory lane and see the best of Emily Litella. Love, Gilda does include some significant bits from her solo stage show, although more of that, given its introspective, semi-serious nature, would have been welcome.

The inevitable comparison here is to the year’s breakout documentary hit, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they’re very different films. While that film, about Fred Rogers, focused more on the what – the show he created, the things he accomplished, and some of the legacy he left behind – Love, Gilda focuses more on the why. Radner was such an unlikely star, because she didn’t look like most female stars of her era, and her own insecurities about her appearance helped drive her to become one of the funniest people on television during her career. There’s a scene around the midpoint of Love, Gilda that seems to sum up her on-stage approach, and how different it was from who she was off screen. In a “Weekend Update” segment on the death of Howdy Doody, Radner is supposed to be playing his widow, Debbie Doody, whom Newman’s reporter character is trying to interview. The sketch is bombing, so Radner, with strings attached to her as if she were a marionette, improvises by throwing herself at Newman and entangling the reporter in a bit of ridiculous but sublime physical comedy. To have that kind of confidence to wing it when you’re dying up there, and to do so in the most absurd way, while struggling with a mountain of doubts about herself and her worthiness to do anything but make people laugh is the great paradox of Radner’s life. Love, Gilda at least begins to answer that question for us.

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→ July 11, 2018
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I was born in 1973, and watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a huge part of my early childhood, something I’d watch every day until I was old enough to go to school. Along with other PBS shows like Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Write On, and the later 3-2-1 Contact!, they made appointment viewing for me before the term even existed.

(Side note: My parents swear I loved the mid-70s show Zoom, but unlike the shows I mentioned above and a few others, I have zero memory whatsoever of Zoom, other than that You Can’t Do That on Television! borrowed its format and one time had its actors sing Zoom‘s theme song.)

So the new documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, about the show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and to some extent about its star and creator, couldn’t be more squarely aimed at me. Featuring extensive interviews with almost everyone who was involved in the show, it gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the program and provides some historical perspective to the show’s importance, although I don’t think it does nearly enough to explain who Fred Rogers was and what drove him to create this seminal yet utterly counterintuitive television program for the youngest viewers.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? focuses on the story of Fred Rogers from the advent of the TV show until his death in 2003, with just scant references to his life before he created Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at Pittsburgh’s public television station WQED. Other than Betty (Lady) Aberlin, who was interviewed but declined to appear on camera (as she apparently felt too self-conscious), it seems like director Morgan Neville talked to everyone living who might have something to tell us about the show, including the actors who played Mr. and Mrs. McFeely, Officer Clemons, and Handyman Negri; producer/director Margy Whitmer and floor manager Nick Tallo; Rogers’ widow and two sons; and his longtime friend Yo-Yo Ma. Combined with clips from multiple interviews Rogers gave over his career about his work and the show, along with quite a bit of archival footage from the show itself and behind the scenes, the documentary manages to explain why Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was so influential and yet seemed so out of place in an environment that thought children needed faster-paced shows and often used the medium simply to sell stuff to young viewers.

But there is a lot missing from this story, both about Rogers himself and the pre-history of his show. The film does include some clips of The Children’s Corner, the first show he created for WQED and the place where many of the puppets who appeared on the later show were first conceived, one of which was an ad hoc fill-in because the show was live and the film strip they had been airing had melted or otherwise broken down on air. It omits the show he created for the CBC, Misterogers, which contributed numerous elements to the later WQED show, and has no mention of his former colleague Ernie Coombs, who became Canada’s Mister Dressup, a show that had much in common with Rogers’ show and which (Wikipedia claims) contributed some songs to the latter.

There are a few hints along the way about Rogers’ life before the Neighborhood, but hardly enough to give us a full picture of his character. Rogers was 40 years old when the first episodes of the show aired, having joined, left, and returned to the seminary, and participated in at least two other shows before his big success. Of his childhood, we learn little; there’s a reference to “Fat Freddy” near the end of the film, but it’s barely explained (and if the pictures we’re shown are any indication, he seemed hardly overweight). He had a quixotic obsession with the number 143, which to him stood for “I love you,” including maintaining his weight at 143 for most of his adult life. That seems like something we might explore more, but other than two of his friends commenting on it being “weird” we get nothing more.

Instead, Neville chose to include some truly tangential material like the right-wing attacks on Rogers’ show and philosophy or the PSAs Rogers filmed after the 9/11 attacks, none of which is that interesting or elucidating on this man whose character still resonates and yet still seems too good to be true. Of all of the archive footage shown that wasn’t directly part of the Neighborhood, none seems to get at this conundrum more than the cringeworthy interview Tom Snyder conducted with Rogers, in which Snyder asks Rogers if he’s “straight.” While I know the question – coming right after Snyder asked “are you square?” – could simply be asking Rogers if his character is really who he is, there’s an undeniable subtext, one this documentary acknowledges, that people assumed Rogers was gay. It is unfathomable to my ears today that an interviewer would ask such a question, but at the same time, showing it now reminds the audience that people have questioned Rogers’ authenticity for a half-century now. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a beautiful trip down the nostalgia path, and does its part to convince the viewer that Mister Rogers is very close to who the real Fred Rogers was; unfortunately it does very little to tell us why.

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→ March 2, 2018
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Faces Places.

Faces Places (original title Visages, Villages) is the last of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature I had to see – I’ve also caught two of the Documentary Short nominees – and I could see an argument that it’s the best. It’s certainly unique among the nominees in that it’s not really about anything at all; the other four all tell stories, often with an eye on exposing or explaining something, but Faces Places is a slice of life in the truest sense of the phrase. It seems like the sort of thing you could never sell until you’d made it and could show a distributor what the finished product is, because the magic here is in the way the two leads interact on screen throughout the movie. You can buy it on Amazon or iTunes.

Agnes Varda is an 89-year-old grande dame of French cinema, a major figure in the New Wave of the 1950s, a friend of Godard, married to Jacques Demy for over 30 years. She and a photographer-artist named JR are the stars of the film, driving around villages in France, visiting friends or acquaintances, taking photos and blowing them up to paste on the sides of buildings, water towers, and train cars. Their interactions with each other – it’s such an unlikely friendship, but the affection is so obviously genuine that it’s truly moving – and with the various locals are the heart of the film. Some of the best moments are the reactions of the people whose photographs JR and Varda take and blow up, how they respond to seeing themselves portrayed in these giant posters. One becomes a mini-celebrity and finds she doesn’t like how people recognize her now as the woman on the side of the building. The wives of three workers at a port end up with their portraits on giant stacks of shipping containers (Frank Sobotka declined comment) and then sit inside their own images in the film’s most memorable shot. One describes feeling large and powerful; another hates feeling enclosed and so far off the ground. It’s peculiar to see how making someone two-dimensional brings out something different in their humanity, but that seems to be the trick of Varda & JR’s technique.

Varda is really the star of the film, though, and that was evident to me even though I was totally unfamiliar with her work or reputation before seeing this. Part of the connection probably came from how she reminded me of my maternal grandmother, who, like Varda, was short (I doubt my grandmother ever saw five feet, and was probably closer to 4’8” when she died at 100), had a raspy voice (she smoked for 75+ years), and kept her hair very short. Seeing Varda lean into JR – who seems pretty tall, although standing next to her makes him look like a giant – reminded me so much of how my grandmother would do the same with me once I was an adult, especially comforting her during moments of melancholy near the end of her life, that I felt an immediate empathy with the director from the movie’s start. When she does have a real moment of deep sadness near the end, the one thing that really happens in the movie, it got to me even though her grief in that scene was intensely personal to her.

Varda became the oldest person to receive an Oscar nomination in any non-honorary category with this year’s nod, and between that and her importance in the industry, Faces Places might be the sentimental favorite, if not the overall favorite, to win for Best Documentary Feature. (The nomination also led to an amusing scene when Varda declined to fly from France to Los Angeles for the nominees’ luncheon, so JR brought a few cardboard cutouts of Varda in her stead, and 2D Varda was a big hit.) Last Men in Aleppo is probably the best of the five for the importance of its subject matter, although I was surprised at how distant I felt from the tragedies on screen in that film. Icarus was the most gripping to watch, because it’s so incredibly bizarre how that filmmaker stumbled on the biggest doping scandal in sports history while trying to make a documentary about something else. If I had a ballot, which I don’t because the Academy just won’t return my calls, I’d probably vote for Icarus, but inside I’d hope Faces Places won anyway … even if cardboard Agnes is the one accepting the award.

* Four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Short are available to stream right now, and I’ve seen two, with a third downloaded to watch today or tomorrow. Knife Skills tells the story of Edwin’s, a Cleveland restaurant that hires people who’ve just been released from prison, training them over a period of several months, while serving classical French cuisine and earning rave reviews. The documentary follows the restaurant’s inaugural class of 120, which ends up whittled by more than half before the restaurant has been open three months, focusing on a few individual student-employees, mostly imprisoned for drug-related offenses, who will surprise you with how quickly they seem to take to and enjoy this grueling work. It’s also on iTunes and amazon.

Traffic Stop is on HBO’s streaming apps, and holy shit, is this a bad look for the Austin Police Department. A white cop pulls a black woman out of her car for speeding, throws her to the ground, beats her, threatens to tase her, and then tells the next officer to arrive that she resisted arrest … but it was all caught on his dash cam. Not only was he not fired for the incident, his superiors didn’t hear about it for over a year, by which point it was too late for them to suspend or fire him; he was just terminated a month ago for standing on a suspect’s head during another arrest. The documentary intersperses all of the dash cam footage with shots of the victim, Breaion King, talking about what it did to her life, and just about herself – she’s a math teacher who has worked in the community and has no criminal history whatsoever, but was targeted because she was black. The big reveal, though, is when a different cop, one who seems to be sympathetic to her, says that the problem is that black people have “violent tendencies” that lead white cops to assume the worst. I see no evidence anywhere that that officer has been disciplined in any way, and can only assume that he’s still out there, representing Austin’s finest.

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→ February 23, 2018
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Strong Island.

Strong Island, available on Netflix, is another of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars and is one of the two that I think was somewhat widely known before the nominations came out, along with Last Men in Aleppo. Ostensibly the story of a murder that took place on Long Island in 1992 for which no one was ever charged, it’s much more the story of that murder’s effect on the victim’s family over the 23 years between when it happened and when the filmmaker, the victim’s brother*, began the project.

William Ford, Jr., was 24 in April of 1992, trying to pass the physical requirements for a job as a corrections officer, the oldest of three children of Barbara and William Sr. His girlfriend’s car had been hit by 19-year-old Mark Reilly, a white man working at a nearby garage (rumored to be a chop shop), who offered to fix the car for free if they didn’t call the cops to report the incident. Ford and his girlfriend, both African-American, agreed, but when Reilly took too long to repair the car and then swears at Ford’s mother, he returned to the garage to confront him, only to have Reilly shoot him with a .22, killing him. The grand jury returned a no true bill against Reilly, choosing to believe it was self-defense even though Ford was unarmed. Ford’s mother claims in the film that the grand jury was all white, and many members weren’t paying attention during witness testimony.

Yance (pronounced “YAN-see”), the middle child in the family, directed this documentary and appears in it frequently along with his* younger sister, his brother’s best friend (who was there when the murder occurred), his mother, and a good college friend of William Jr.’s. Not appearing, however, are anyone connected with the investigation; the ADA at the time declines to comment at all, even on the phone, while the investigating officer does comment in a recorded interview but does not appear. Neither Reilly nor the other white man at the garage that night appear, and Ford himself has been very clear that he does not want to give Reilly any “space” in the film. The murder is described, but it is an inflection point in the broader story, not a mystery to be solved. The reveal, such as it is, is minor to the viewers but major to Yance.

* Yance Ford identifies as queer in the film, but is referred to everywhere within the film as a daughter, a sister, etc. Apparently since filming ended, he has come out as trans, and most subsequent media coverage uses male pronouns (without, from what I can see, acknowledging the disparity). I’m just following their lead, but I may be wrong.

It is, therefore, a somewhat frustrating documentary, because the topic is so insular. A happy nuclear family was blown up by the murder of their son and oldest child, after which grief starts to tear apart the fabric holding them together. The father dies not long after the murder, long enough ago that he’s only in the film on video once, in archival footage. But their grief is quiet and private, and I didn’t get an emotional connection to the tragedy the way I think Yance might have intended. Their loss is huge, but William, Jr., is a figurative ghost in the film. And the racial aspects, while undeniable – if you don’t think a black man would have been indicted for the same crime with a white victim, I don’t know what to tell you – are also somewhat academic here. There’s nothing here to prove racial bias in the investigation or grand jury proceedings. Instead, Strong Island feels a bit like reading someone else’s diary – like I’m intruding on the grief of a family I don’t even know, and the cascading tragedies of the story are too distant to get the emotional response the writer would have had himself.

That said, it wouldn’t shock me in the least if this won the Oscar, given the racial politics of the film and high profile right now of Black Lives Matter and similar movements. It’s not the best documentary this year, but its subject matter might resonate more with voters than topics like Syria, doping, or the financial crisis.

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→ February 22, 2018
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Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) that originally aired on PBS’s Frontline, earned one of the five nominations for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars. The film follows Abacus, the only bank to face criminal prosecution in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, through the subsequent trial, largely from the perspective of the Sung family, who founded and still run the small neighborhood bank, based in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The resulting picture is one of politically-motivated prosecution of a non-white institution, of whom the overly ambitious Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., could make an example, while getting himself in front of the cameras. You can stream the film for free on PBS’s site, or via Amazon Prime.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank discovered in 2010-11 that one of its loan officers had submitted several loan applications with false information – such as forged employment info or inflated income claims – and had skimmed money from some clients, so they reported the violations to the Office of Thrift Supervision themselves, fired the offending loan officer, and began examining other loans he’d made. Despite the self-reporting, the Manhattan DA’s office chose in 2012 to indict the bank and its officers on over 200 counts related to mortgage fraud, including grand larceny, threatening the group with jail time, fines, and the potential closure of the bank. The Sung family, who founded the bank in 1984, chose to fight all charges; one of their daughters quit her job in the DA’s office and went to work on her family’s defense. Their defense included evidence that the offending loan officers had taken steps to hide their misdeeds from executives, that the loans in question still performed, and that their decision to report themselves showed they were not engaged in any systematic attempt to defraud Fannie Mae, which purchased many of the loans in question.

The Sungs are the stars of Abacus, of course, and their dismay and indignation power the film. It’s clear from the start that the family members involved in the bank saw no choice but to fight the charges, recognizing that even a generous plea agreement might ruin the company, and in the film they repeatedly emphasize what the bank means to the Chinese community in which it operates. Tom Sung, a co-founder of the bank and the family patriarch, recounts the difficulty Chinese entrepreneurs would have in obtaining loans from white-owned banks that were perfectly happy to take those same customers’ deposits. Along with community activist Don Lee (who has a politician’s coiffure) and several reporters who covered the case, the Sungs describe the different norms of the Chinese business world, and how American rules that might target mortgage fraud also made it harder for immigrants to obtain such loans, even if their income was legitimate and their default rates were extremely low. (Abacus claims a 0.5% default rate on mortgages it originates; the national rate for serious delinquency reached 4.9% in 2010 and dropped to a ten-year low of 1.1% last year.)

Vance and Polly Greenberg, who served as chief of the DA’s Major Economic Crimes division from 2012 to 2015, both appear in the film to their own detriment, as they come off in the final product as vindictive and unapologetic despite evidence that they put extremely unreliable witnesses on the stand, possibly suborning perjury in the process. (The film was made before revelations that Vance declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault around the time that Weinstein contributed to Vance’s campaign.) Their star witness, in particular, lied repeatedly under oath and eventually had his plea deal revoked as a result of his false testimony. It’s entirely possible that James isn’t showing enough of the prosecution’s side of the case, although given his reputation and the ultimate outcome of the trial, I am inclined to give him and the film the benefit of the doubt. At the absolute least, Vance and Greenberg failed in their duty to do sufficient due diligence on their key witnesses, and that opens them up to charges of malicious, racially-motivated prosecution. Vance Jr. was unopposed in the November election, which is too bad, as Abacus would make a fine campaign film for anyone running against him.

I’ve seen three of the five nominees for this category now, with Netflix’s Strong Island downloaded for my next flight, and Faces Places due out on DVD at least on March 6th (after the awards … this is so stupid; if you’re nominated and can’t get into theaters, put it out to stream right away, I am trying to give you my money). Abacus is the best made of the three documentaries I’ve seen, but lacks the emotional punch of Last Men in Aleppo or the holy-crap aspects of the more timely Icarus. FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey has pointed out that this year’s slate of nominees is extremely weird anyway.

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→ November 28, 2017
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Icarus.

Icarus, a documentary now available on Netflix, covers the Russian state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes from the most direct, personal angle possible: The director was working with the architect of the program on a completely different project when the story broke in a German documentary, The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners. So instead of merely following the chronology of the program’s execution, the leak to the press, and the subsequent drama around the WADA recommendations to ban all Russian athletes from the 2016 Olympics and the IOC’s decision to give WADA the finger, Icarus gives it to viewers in real time from the perspective of one of the whistleblowers who ends up fearing for his life.

Filmmaker Bryan Fogel decided, on what appears to be a whim, to race in a Haute Route cycling event, a seven-day endurance test across difficult terrain, this time in the Alps of southeastern France. (They also hold similar events in the Pyrénées and in the Rockies.) He finishes in the top 20, but his body just gives out near the end, so he does what any normal person would do in response – he decides to start doping to see how much a little artificial help will improve his performance. (He notes that the event bans performance-enhancing drugs but doesn’t bother testing for them.) He contacts the former head of the main U.S. testing lab, who agrees to help but eventually reneges and refers Fogel to Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Russian Anti-Doping Centre, a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory that would test athletes for PED usage. Rodchenkov also knew quite a bit about the benefits of the various PEDs available to Fogel and helped him design a protocol, with the help of an “anti-aging” doctor here in the U.S., to improve his performance in a second shot at the Haute Route.

That second race doesn’t go as well as planned, but it becomes thoroughly secondary to the film’s real story: The German documentary exposes the Russians’ state-run doping program, claiming many of the country’s medals in recent Olympics, including Sochi, were achieved by athletes who should have failed PED tests but didn’t. Rodchenkov was actually running the doping program on the side, even while he was running the anti-doping facility, and during the filming of Icarus, he begins to fear that the government is watching him and possibly preparing to arrest him, so he flees to the U.S. and tells his everything to the New York Times for a piece that ran on May 12, 2016. That article blew the doors off the scandal and led to a longer WADA investigation, which the IOC chose to ignore because of reasons we can only imagine – as Rodchenko makes it clear that he believes Vladimir Putin, who approved the doping program, will stop at nothing to silence his enemies. We learn that one of Rodchenkov’s associates died, allegedly of a heart attack, in February 2016, shortly after the German film aired; another died the same month, with both men former directors of Russia’s anti-doping agency.

There is so much to unpack in Icarus, which is thoroughly gripping even though you invest the first 40 minutes or so in a story that doesn’t matter. (It’s never really clear why Fogel is willing to subject his body to the doping regimen, whether it’s a desire to win, a desire to show what doping can do, a Morgan Spurlock-style attitude to filmmaking, or something else). What was a weird but intriguing documentary that looked at the history of doping and the cat-and-mouse game between the athletes who use such drugs and the labs that try to catch them turns into a darker, real-life spy thriller. The film doesn’t bother with bothsidesism; Rodchenkov’s credibility isn’t questioned, nor are we given any reason to question it, and he provides Fogel with detailed notes on specific athletes’ regimens that seem to immediately convince a group of appalled members of WADA who walked into a conference room believing that this kind of program was physically impossible. (The KGB manages to tamper with WADA’s tamper-proof caps, among other tricks.) And a subsequent special investigation, led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, found that over 1000 Russian athletes had doped in events over the time period covered.

Two angles in particular stand out from this. One, relevant to those of us here with an interest in baseball, is that a sufficiently determined and organized group can defeat even a sophisticated testing program. This isn’t about masking agents, or super-secret new drugs that haven’t hit testing protocols yet, but about physical exchange of dirty samples for clean ones that won’t test positive. It shows how difficult such a scheme would be to pull off … but also that it was pulled off, successfully, for years, and therefore is at least feasible.

But I don’t know how you can watch Icarus now without drawing the obvious parallel: Vladimir Putin approved a program to interfere with a competition that went beyond his own borders to try to engineer the results he desired – and even when given irrefutable proof of what he did, he just dismisses it as, in essense, fake news. He even gets away with it, despite those meddling kids, because I’ve seen jellyfish with stronger spines than the IOC, which just gave carte blanche to any major power to dope the hell out of its athletes. There’s even a scene where we see a Russian TV show airing emails between Fogel and Rodchenkov – emails obtained via hacking. We’re fighting someone who appears willing to do anything, perhaps even kill, to achieve his goals, and who thus far has proved immune to any penalty or retribution. It’s a grim projection for the future of international sport … and our elections, too.

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→ November 28, 2017
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Last Men in Aleppo.

The Syrian Civil Defense, better known now as the White Helmets after a documentary short by that name won the Oscar in that category this past February, is a volunteer organization that has operated in Syria since 2014, providing rescue and medical services in the wake of airstrikes in the failed state, including in the major city of Aleppo before and during the siege of the town in 2016. Last Men in Aleppo follows the group, focusing on two of the volunteers, Khaled and Mahmoud, as they race around the city, trying to rescue victims buried under rubble, while also trying to live their lives, like Khaled worrying about medicine for his daughter, or Mahmoud trying to coax his brother to flee. The film is available via iTunes or to rent/buy directly from the distributor.

Filmed in cinéma vérité style, Last Men in Aleppo has no narration or overarching structure, and simply follows the two men and some of their colleagues from airstrike to airstrike, mixing in scenes of almost mundane daily life, including an outing with their families to a playground – which, of course, is cut short by the sighting of government warplanes. (All of the airstrikes shown or discussed in the film are either from Syrian government jets or Russian jets.) The rescue scenes are gripping and horrifying, since they find more dead bodies than survivors, and are often pulling children from the wrecks. The survivors are often shown wracked by grief as they realize most of their family members are dead – and there’s no editing here to soften the impact on the viewer. The camera observes, nothing more.

That editorial decision makes the movie somewhat hard to follow, as there’s no story to track, and the pacing is as uneven as the pacing of real life. We see the men in their regular lives, or the facsimile thereof in a city under siege, interrupted by a bombing and a phone call, and they race to the scene with their comrades and the construction equipment they use to excavate the wreckage of bombed-out buildings. There’s a ton of disturbing footage in here, including corpses of babies, body parts, head injuries, and even a badly wounded cat. It is utterly draining, and simultaneously honors the bravery and altruism of these men while reminding the viewer of the enormous suffering of the people of Aleppo and Syria in general, suffering that the United States has done very little to stop.

That last bit was the biggest takeaway from Last Men in Aleppo for me – the lives of ordinary people have been discarded by a dictator’s brutal efforts to retain power over his country, even if there are very few people left in it, supported by another dictator whose warplanes are helping bomb innocent civilians, sometimes appearing to even target the White Helmets while they work. The west at least intervened to stop a government-led massacre in Libya during that country’s version of the Arab Spring, although the end result has been a failed state there as well. In fact, it’s unclear that western intervention can do much of anything except to avoid the direct killings of airstrikes and ground invasions, as the one true success story of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, succeeded without any involvement from the west. Libya is close to a failed state, as is Syria. Yemen is suffering from famine and a cholera outbreak with nearly a million victims. Egypt overthrew its dictator only to end up with a military autocracy. So maybe we couldn’t have done anything to help any of these countries transition to democracy or peace. It’s just hard to watch Last Men in Aleppo without thinking that anything we do would have been better than the nothing we’ve done.

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→ November 8, 2017
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City of Ghosts.

City of Ghosts, now available on amazon Prime, follows the citizen-journalist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, which began disseminating information online about the atrocities committed by the Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, during their three-plus year occupation of the once-prosperous Syrian city. RBSS won the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2015, even as some of its leaders were being hunted down and executed by Daesh supporters in Syria and in Turkey. The group continues to operate, with its leadership in exile, relying on anonymous contributors still in the city, which was just liberated from Daesh control by Kurdish-led anti-government forces three weeks ago.

(The group that occupied Raqqa goes by many names, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but the RBSS members interviewed in this documentary appear to favor the term Daesh, which ISIL leaders themselves dislike. As that is what the RBSS members use, I’ll follow that convention here.)

Raqqa was the sixth-largest city in Syria, with a population of 220,000 in the 2004 census (per Wikipedia), and hosted many anti-government protests during the Syrian portion of the Arab Spring, with the toppling of a statue of the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad coming when a mixed coalition of opposing forces took the city from the Syrian army. In less than a year, however, Daesh forces took control of Raqqa, setting up a sharia court and executing opponents in the middle of the day in the town square. The journalists and activists who formed RBSS began almost immediately to document the conditions in the town under the Daesh, including the executions and the extreme privation, by posting videos, photos, and written content to social media and Youtube. With no foreign journalists on the ground in the city, RBSS quickly gained credibility as one of the few reliable (non-Daesh) information sources there, and a film directed by RBSS co-founder Naji Jerf helped them win the aforementioned award from CPJ. RBSS were quickly targeted by the occupying forces, who threatened to kill every member they could find – and the family members of those they couldn’t. They executed several members still in Raqqa, and assassinated several others outside of the country, including Jerf, killed in broad daylight in Turkey in 2015.

City of Ghosts follows the remaining leaders of RBSS, walking back to the group’s origins and carrying the story forward about two years, through the losses of several group leaders, the flights of many others into exile, and their continuing work to tell the world of the conditions in Raqqa – and to try to contradict the Daesh’s recruiting videos, which, shocking as it is, don’t exactly depict real life as a member of the jihadist group. Director Matthew Heineman manages to give the viewer the information s/he needs on the actual progress of the civil war and the occupation of Raqqa as foundation, while still centering the documentary itself on the individuals, all men, who are risking their lives and even those of family members to fight the Daesh with information. Each has his own story, whether it’s specific reasons for joining the effort or the very personal cost paid for his involvement. Watching them flee to exile in Germany, only to be confronted by neo-Nazis and anti-immigrant protesters, only serves to underscore how incredibly lonely this existence must be.

The film did leave me with one question, although it may have been too dangerous to answer. Someone has to be funding the group; we never see these courageous men discussing money, but they have laptops, smart phones, video cameras, and obviously are eating and buying the essentials. The effort may have started organically, but somewhere there must be a source of funds that allows them to continue to live, and thus to work on informing the world that Raqqa is burning. Of course, identifying any funding sources could have put them in jeopardy, and thus jeopardizing the group’s work. At the time of the film’s release, Raqqa was still under Daesh control, and their efforts remained as important as ever.

Documentaries about the ongoing catastrophe that is the Syrian civil war are everywhere now; The White Helmets won the Oscar for short-subject documentary last year, and Last Men in Aleppo is a full-length feature on the same topic (and in my queue to watch). Sebastian Junger’s Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS is supposed to take a more direct look at the state of the war and the failed state of Syria. HBO’s Cries from Syria focuses on the human cost and humanitarian crisis. As obsessed as much of our polity here is with the Daesh and the occasional terrorist attack abroad by adherents, there’s still so little happening to stop the crisis; even if the Daesh, who control a fraction of the territory they did at their peak, are totally removed from power, there will still be a civil war in Syria, with Kurds at odds with the central government, and numerous other rebel groups vying for control of the country. By putting a few young heroes at the heart of its story, City of Ghosts provides a new lens on the disaster while testifying to the relentless human desire to be free.

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