This column has explored the idea of America before, and as we approach a historic anniversary of the nation’s founding, it’s as good a time as any to do it again. The nation’s origin story has always been told in terms of capital-F freedom; these five films are about the constant struggle to carve it out and preserve it, over and over.
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People would often tell the teenage basketball star player William Gates not to forget about them when he made it to the pros. He’d think, “I should say to them, ‘Well, if I don’t make it, don’t forget about me.’” That is, in essence, the sobering indictment of an entire country in Steve James’s sprawling, all-timer documentary.
Tracking Gates and Arthur Agee, two young Black basketball prospects from the Chicago projects, across their high school years, the film is an unsensationalized, wholly illuminating mosaic, not of basketball per se, but of American life and poverty. The boys are sold dreams of sports stardom by self-interested coaches and recruiters, but without a real infrastructure of support to succeed, you see instead the inexorable downward pull of predictably grim cycles.
One of the most heartbreaking moments you’ll find in any documentary is when Gates and Agee, who eventually wind up at different high schools, embrace after a game. Even as we’ve followed both of their lives for years, we’ve never seen them actually together, until now. In that instant, William cries in Arthur’s arms. For a moment, there is someone else there who understands what it’s like to be a teen — a kid, really — with so much expectation, so little help and no other options.
On a phone call from a Louisiana prison, Robert tells his wife, Sibil, that he looked up at the fluffy clouds today, and imagined bounding off one to another. And he looked out onto a pecan orchard. Those trees, he explains, were planted when he first arrived at the prison, two decades ago.
Then, like a cruel cosmic joke, an automated voice intrudes, ending the call: So much time, and so little of it.
Garrett Bradley’s documentary posits that the U.S. criminal justice system doubles as modern-day slavery, but it’s as much a portrait of Sibil, whose fiery poise and resolve, raising six children while her husband is incarcerated, forms the film’s engine.
Yet Bradley’s film is most remarkably defined by its poetic touch — the black-and-white photography, its dreamlike quality, the decision to leave out as much as it puts in — that is far more viscerally moving than any issues-film approach. You’re left wondering, with a desperate emotional urgency rather than a politicized one: Isn’t there another way? How do you get all that time back?
File this in the category of ’70s screen moments that should be iconic, if only that decade hadn’t been so chockablock with spectacular films: Melvyn Douglas kneeling down in the final minutes of “The Candidate,” looking into the eyes of a stunned Robert Redford and declaring, as if casting a sinister curse: “Son, you’re a politician.”
You can see how incisive this political satire must have been in 1972, particularly as television and media — and in turn mass-produced image and advertising — were still relatively new to shaping our politics. It follows Bill McKay (Redford), a handsome progressive lawyer who is recruited to run a losing campaign for senator and given carte blanche to speak his mind about the country.
Over time, McKay doesn’t explicitly compromise his values so much as quietly become better at embodying an empty suit. His evolution into a mealy-mouthed cutout of an electable senator is so thorough that his win becomes impossible to stop (even though McKay was meant to lose!). Because that’s what it’s all about in politics.
America is also defined by those who exist outside the status quo. That story is a pendulum, swinging between resilience and repression. In “Paris Is Burning,” it’s also defiant beauty and terrible pain, raw jubilation and expression — if only in a sweaty ballroom.
Even decades later, Jennie Livingston’s groundbreaking tableau of New York City queer life and ballroom culture still feels like an experience in thrilling discovery. Capturing the “houses” of competitors in and out of the ballroom, it’s a euphoric primer on this world, in the abandon and acceptance they find with each other, but also the competition and cattiness.
The undercurrent of the film, though, is its streak of longing. Permeating the balls and the people is the desperate air of desire, to be adored, to be moneyed and to be draped in luxury — which is also to be free from stigma and terror. The violence here blindsides the viewer every time, even as we know that’s how these stories so often end.
There are moments, particularly in the early portions of Laura Poitras’s documentary following the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, that are as enrapturing and chilling as any scripted conspiracy thriller. Poitras uses basic formal elements — emails, online chats, a foreboding score, the view of a tunnel or a construction site — to create a powerfully visceral, conspiratorial fear around what’s at stake.
But of course, this documentary, taking place in the days immediately before and after Snowden’s 2013 revelations of the National Security Agency’s unfettered global surveillance networks, is decidedly real, almost bizarrely so. Alongside that sense of dread is also plain, raw footage of a remarkably principled (and frighteningly young at 30) Snowden, holed up in a Hong Kong hotel, matter-of-factly detailing the Orwellian nightmare he is about to unveil, while the world outside spins on unaware. Then, immediately after his revelations break, gigantic video billboards across the street (and the world) are suddenly displaying his face.
