Winning Failures

My Picks from the Documentary Shorts Oscar Candidates

Happily, the idea for Today’s column fell into my lap this time around and, lazy though that may well be, I’m not the least bit ashamed of it.

Lady and I went to the cinema to catch the Oscar Nominated Shorts — Documentary films. With only a slight disturbance toward the end when our projector malfunctioned, we were largely (but for the incessant Netflix advertisements) allowed the opportunity to slink lower and lower into the realms of unhappiness and misery, observing human misfortune after human misfortune.

After human misfortune.

All of the films were good, of course. My favorite was titled When We Were Bullies, about a Brooklyn man’s decision to contact his fifth grade classmates from Public School 194, in hopes of understanding a nasty memory. The entire class one day chose to spontaneously circle and variously abuse a single boy guilty of a major sin — holding them up after class on account of he was yapping. The film, which includes a face to face interview with Mrs. Bromberg (the stern, wise, and rather single-minded teacher who outlived a number of her students), is a case study in how group dynamics can single out and isolate individuals who don't gel with the status quo. When this happens, we can turn nasty very quickly.

The film that I believe should win the award was Audible, about a high school with a very good football record [insert impressive numbers here] who also happens to be a school for the Deaf. The necessitous sound editing in the film is of course on point, but the whole of the thing is really rather technically masterful — from camera work, photography, and editing all the way through to the score of choicely selected syrupy pop hip hop. And couched within the marvels of sight and sound, the story of a single player is told very skillfully. No spoilers here — go see it. (And the others.)

In contrast to the aesthetic consistency of my selection, however, is the film I would like to nominate instead — had it not so dearly flopped. That film is Lead Me Home, a study of our current nationwide homelessness crisis. As of January this year, over half a million citizens are without a stable roof, a multi-factorial complex of issues coalescing into a single tragic result. The film looks at a handful of cities, with a focus on the West Coast, highlighting Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Happily, the film features a few particular individuals, for whom we develop the requisite empathy. In fact, I’ve been thinking about all three of them regularly for the past few days. Also expectedly, we can intuit through the fragments of anecdotal data we’re given that these individuals struggle to varying degrees with a confluence of vicious issues including trauma, substance abuse, mental illness, and discrimination (among, most likely, others).

We see some Zoom calls with city officials trying ineffectively to get a handle on the situation, some city council meetings where homeowners despair, get adequate footage of protestors reminding us that agitation is mandatory for action, and are shown many touching but vain attempts to provide band aids to the ailing Sapiens in the form of mobile shower units, meal provisions, and disaster-response style arena bunkhouses.

One story in particular which wrenched not a few tears was that of a woman who, despite the circumstances, found ways to buy groceries and feed her two kids (and baby on the way) home-cooked meals in order to provide them a modicum of stability in a ceaselessly volatile predicament of scarcely adequate temporary housing solutions.

The film really starts to cook when it begins to resemble The Qatsi Trilogy, the set of collaborative films between Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass which present anthropological big history in a symphonic portrayal of the evolution of technology. Lead Me Home begins to gently lift off the ground toward this type of cinematic feat by interspersing the personal stories with sped-up segments of urban construction, the lights of the autos whirling into streaks as the sun ascends and descends over bulldozers, cranes, steamrollers, and trucks that continue to perpetually erect high-rises just yards away from highway-adjacent tent encampments. Creepily, this is brought “home” with exterior window shots of middle-to-upper classers making dinner in their expensive loft apartments. The idea of “disparity” becomes obvious but, more than that, it also begins to become pattern, a shape and form we can see extending from prehistory through the present, which we are now reminded (over a stirring score by Gil Talmi) could possibly be assisted by human ingenuity if accompanied by the tools of market Democracy.

Maybe? The problem is perhaps that our aspirations toward such a feat collapse as does the film, under the weight of anecdotes. Humanity, the very thing which stirs us to remember that WE NEED TO ADDRESS THIS PROBLEM IMMEDIATELY, and its attendant empathy (which can cause us to sequester into other-side-hating resentment) threatens to prevent us from effectively introducing the types of initially-likely-to-be-unpopular legislations which could make a sustaining impact on such a difficult problem.

When the film abruptly breaks with its own aesthetic continuity at the end, shifting roughly from the uber-modern symphonic ambience of Talmi’s score into St. Louis-native-turned-Asheville-hipster Angel Olsen’s little folksong “Endless Road” (from which the film gets its title), it is jarring and (to my sensibilities) offensive. It’s a hard shift from the macro level to the micro, economics to storytelling. High modernism and folk music don’t necessarily couple well.

That issue compels me to declare that I ultimately cannot endorse consideration of the film for the coveted award. It is also the same tension that causes me to continue to think about the film days later. Amplify the dissonance! as my therapist would say. Lead Me Home could’ve been a folksy feel-piece without aspiring toward being something more masterful. And yet it did aspire toward being something more masterful.

What a beautifully graceful failure.