Best Documentary?

Having finally caught up with the last of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, I am prompted to offer a slew of documentary recommendations (many available on Netflix streaming). 

While perfectly happy with sentimental favorite Searching for Sugar Man (2012, MC-79, NFX) as the Oscar winner, I have to say that two nominees seemed weightier, from either side of the wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis.  Sugar Man was certainly a delight and a marvel, but simply more calculated to please than the other nominees, feel-good rather than feel-bad.  Rather artfully constructed after the fact, the “search” nonetheless turns up an amazing find.  Rodriguez recorded a couple of records to some acclaim around 1970, and was well positioned somewhere between Bob Dylan and James Taylor, but he lacked the drive to perform and promote (would sometimes play with his back to the audience) and disappeared into odd jobs around Detroit.  Meanwhile, bootlegged copies of his album became a legendary phenomenon in South Africa, of all places.  Among the tales of the popular cult were different versions of his onstage suicide.  Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul teamed up with South African music lovers on a quest for the real story, and eventually they found the real Rodriguez, who still writes and sings while not working construction jobs, and is quite a character, sort of a mellow sage.  Sold out shows in South Africa provide a rousing climax to the film, with the Oscar for capper.  The whole story is surprising and inspiring, heartwarming in its recognition of hidden genius, but the other nominees confront issues that are chilling and cautionary.

I cultivate a deliberate ignorance about the conflict between Palestine and Israel, since I do not choose to ponder insoluble problems over which I have no control, but two films cracked my shell this year.  On the Palestinian side, 5 Broken Cameras (MC-78, NFX) documents the deterioration of relations year by year, as olive groves are burnt and the wall is built, demonstrations meeting violence from nervous young soldiers of the occupying army.  With those five cameras, filming up to the instant when they are broken by club or bullet, Emad Burnat filmed not just the demonstrations but his youngest son growing up into this climate of oppression and hate -- a home movie for those without a homeland.  Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi helped shape the footage into an intimate and revelatory passage to the other side, seeing with the other’s eyes.  Extremely powerful, extremely disturbing.

In its own way, the view from the other side of the wall is even more powerful and disturbing.  In The Gatekeepers (MC-91, NFX), Dror Moreh interviews six former directors of Israel’s domestic security service, and brilliantly recapitulates the history of the Palestinian occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967, through all the various intifadas and retaliations and all the squelched peace initiatives.  The wonder is that not one of these officials toes the official line.  All of them come by various paths to the conclusion that the occupation and the settlements are a mistake, that Israel can win every battle and still lose the war, that the only real solution, the key to security, is not military, but diplomatic; negotiation not confrontation, coexistence in two separate states.  Moreh was inspired by Errol Morris’ interrogation of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, and has compiled an equally compelling document of second thoughts by those in a position to know.  Just the fact that it has been made and shown in Israeli is a small ground for hope.

On the home front, The Invisible War (MC-75, NFX) is a well-made and effective piece of advocacy for a public problem – sexual harassment and rape in the armed forces -- that needs the light of day, and with the aid of Kirby Dick’s film has now become a national issue for Congress and the military.  Mixed with telling statistics and other context, the film focuses intently on the Catch-22 perversities that a number of women (and the occasional man) have suffered after being subjected to sexual assault while in the service.  The personalizing of the pain makes the numbers and arguments all the more intense.  This is a worthy effort to open eyes and change minds.

Another Oscar nominee that delves into the vicissitudes of political activism and public enlightenment in a good cause, David France’s How to Survive a Plague (MC-87, NFX), has the advantage of lots of on-the-spot archival footage, in telling the story of AIDS activists trying to move the system toward effective research and treatment in the 80s and 90s.  The film’s most fascinating aspect, so inside the immediate proceedings, is in dramatizing the way movements inevitably wind up going to war with each other, whether they succeed or fail with the institution they’re trying to move.  The mix of historical scenes and contemporary retrospection by survivors tells the tale effectively, in a way that spins out from gay issues, partially past though still poignant, into questions of political activism in general.  With ACT UP as a test case, we can see what activism accomplishes and what it fails to accomplish, and at least partially, why.

Catching up with this year’s Oscar nominees, I realized I’d never seen last year’s winner, and like many of these docs under discussion, it’s available for instant viewing on Netflix.  Undefeated  (MC-71, NFX) is a perfectly serviceable sports documentary, easily pitched as Hoop Dreams meets Friday Night Lights, about a high school football team.  As the story of a white coach who lifts the spirits and competitiveness of an all-black football team at a Memphis school, it flirts dangerously with comparison to The Blind Side, but stays pretty honest as well as righteous.  I liked it, but it doesn’t bear comparison with The Interrupters by Steve James, which wasn’t even nominated that year.

Moving into candidates for next year’s Oscar, we start with two excellent films that explore the persistent racial and class discrimination built into our legal system.  The House I Live In (MC-77, NFX) makes the personal political, and vice versa, for Eugene Jarecki, who directed the outstanding Why We Fight and other worthy documentaries.  The well-to-do house he grew up in, with two brothers who also became filmmakers, was overseen by his “second mother,” Nannie Jeter, and her children were playmates of his, but they went in different directions.  Asked why, their mother has a one-word answer, “Drugs,” but from there Jarecki goes on to show that the more accurate answer is “The War on Drugs,” which registers as racial, ethnic, and class oppression for some, and as public works money for others, incarcerating vast numbers of casual users under draconian mandatory sentences.  Combining personal inquiry with wide-ranging research and telling interviews, most strikingly with David Simon, creator of The Wire, this film makes a strong case against current policing and judicial policies.

Another angle on a related problem is provided by Gideon’s Army (MC-93, NFX), part of HBO’s generally excellent summer documentary series.  Dawn Porter’s film examines similar judicial issues through the narrow but salient lens of various public defenders in the South, those assigned to shepherd the poorest of the poor through the legal system, negotiating its traps and snares in ways that are simple for those who can afford more aggressive representation.  The real-life hero of the film is a public defender who vows to have the name of any client of his who is convicted tattooed to his back.  The passion these young lawyers bring to making the system play fair is admirable, even while it seems a hopelessly Sisyphean labor.

There are documentarians who draw you by their subject, by its social or political significance, and then there are those who draw you by their empathetic insight and storytelling skill.  Lucy Walker is one of the latter.  Here last two films were deservedly Academy Award nominees, Waste Land for feature and The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom for short.  So I gave The Crash Reel (MC-82, NFX) a chance when it appeared in the HBO series, despite my extreme lack of interest in X-treme sports such as competitive snowboarding.  And I advise you to do the same if you get the chance.  You may go slack-jawed with either wonder or boredom at the stunts these guys pull, but you can’t help becoming involved with an attractive Vermont family confronting a number of crises, as the film becomes an examination of parenting and brotherhood, as well as bro’-hood and competitive rivalry, not to mention the medical facts of traumatic brain injury.  If like me, you are totally unaware of who Kevin Pearce is, I’ll let his story unfold with all the twists and turns that Lucy Walker documents so well.

Where to begin with 56 Up (MC-83, NFX)?  Well, ideally with 21 Up or even earlier in this septannual series, which documents an assortment of British boys and girls as they grow up to become parents and grandparents.  It’s much better to come back every seven years and revisit a group of old acquaintances – Neil and Bruce, Suzie and Nick, Paul and Tony, the three East End girls, et al. -- but if you are not already among those who avidly await the next installment, you could do worse than simply start with 56 Up.  Each installment recapitulates the earlier ones, so in the blink of an eye you see someone go from 7 to 14 to 21 and on, which makes up in inherent visual interest for the necessarily sketchy backstories.  But then of course you miss the more rounded play of expectation and surprise in the passage of life that the whole series conveys.  Michael Apted has continually come back to this project between making features as good as Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist.  We can only hope he keeps it up.  He knows his subjects, they know him, and we are invited to the illusion that we know them as well, their joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats, and just plain muddling through.  Funny, touching, engrossing, with full appreciation for the ambiguities of observing -- if you’re not already hooked, find out what the fuss is all about.

It takes a pretty deft touch to present people one wouldn’t want to know, exemplars of mindless excess, in a way that can be seen as sympathetic portrait as well as scathing satire.  That’s what Lauren Greenfield achieves in Queen of Versailles (MC-80, NFX).  She began filming a couple in the process of building a monument to conspicuous consumption, the largest private home in America.  He was a billionaire timeshare magnate, she a tacky trophy wife, and they named their home after Louis XIV’s palace, without being able to pronounce it.  The real estate bubble burst, and their lifestyle crashed around their ears.  A just comeuppance in one sense, but in another it offers an exemplum of a society living beyond its means, and coming into rough contact with economic reality.

Ross McElwee presents a mordant self-portrait in Photographic Memory (MC-79, NFX), the latest installment in his series of first-person documentaries, including most notably Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves.  Trying to come to grips with the creeping estrangement of his 20ish son, whom we see growing up under his father’s camera eye, McElwee tries to revisit himself at the same age, when he was on extended stay in France working as a photographer’s assistant.  He returns to Brittany and tries to find the man he worked for and the woman he lived with.  He goes down paths familiar and unexpected.  And returns with at least a bit better understanding of his son’s stage of life.  Nothing earthshaking, but McElwee’s wry tone and honest self-inquiry make for enjoyable and thoughtful viewing. 

I’ve recently watched a number of documentaries about dance, but there are two new ones that I’m happy to recommend.  First Position (MC-72, NFX) follows a well-worn path, from Spellbound on, of young people pointing toward and eventually competing in a high-stakes contest.  In this case, Bess Kargman tracks a number of school age ballet dancers who come to New York from all over the world to compete for prizes and admission to professional ballet companies.  If the frame is familiar, the commitment and talent of the young dancers is fresh and astounding.  Never Stand Still (NFX) is a highly-watchable celebration of a Berkshire cultural landmark, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, with historical background and a sampling of the venue’s variety of programs.  It made me want to get in the car and drive down to Becket, for the first time in ages.

I’ve always been a big advocate for the art of documentary, which has been enriched by each advance in the quality and portability of filmmaking equipment, and sustained by a long tradition of nonfiction storytelling, fulfilling in many different ways the classic Grierson definition of documentary – “the creative treatment of actuality.”  On the evidence presented here, documentaries are better than ever.