Recently we saw the release of Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” and arriving this weekend is Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job. Waiting for “Superman” deals with the issues facing public schooling in America while Inside Job tackles the causes of the economic crisis. As of right now Superman has a 93% RottenTomatoes rating and Inside Job has a pre-release rating of 95%. These are extraordinarily high numbers signaling these must be great films, but what does that mean?
Does it mean public schooling in America will begin improving immediately? Does it mean those responsible for causing the economic crisis will be held accountable? Does it mean critics and audiences hailing the films as marvels will take an active role? The answer to those first two questions is obviously no, but what I’m more interested in is the third question and how it relates to the overall effect of a documentary.
Can a documentary pointing out a social injustice be considered great if it doesn’t effect any measure of change? Last year’s Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove focused on the slaughtering of dolphins in Taiji, Japan and was loved all across the world. It even caused a temporary ban on killing bottlenose dolphins in 2009. Yet, on September 1, 2010 the cove opened once again and pictures have already surfaced showing the first whale killings. While no dolphins have said to have been slaughtered yet they are still being rounded up in order to be sent to aquariums around the world. On top of that, expectation is the cove’s water will soon turn red in the coming weeks despite the major international attention.
So, did The Cove make a difference? Was it great? Was it important?
Looking at Waiting for “Superman” it’s more of a speculative question when you wonder if it will cause for any change, and if so what kind? Does it mean we should expect children to go to charter schools from now on? Schooling on Saturdays? The downfall of the teachers unions? The firing of insufficient educators and the abolition of New York’s “rubber rooms”?
Teachers unions and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, are made to look like something of a villain in Waiting for “Superman”. Bad teachers are highlighted and perhaps most shocking is the $100 million a year price tag placed on New York City’s “rubber rooms,” which house teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence in the classroom for months or even years while they still get full pay and do nothing for it but sit in a room five days a week.
In an article at Time it quotes CNN’s Roland Martin Twittering something to the effect that Randi Weingarten said “they are going to look at making change to teachers tenure in their contracts. THIS IS HUGE.” Well, if you watch the top video to the right you’ll see Weingarten’s just released comments (two weeks after Martin’s Twitter message) regarding the matter and the video below that is an interview she gave in October 2009 to the Kojo Nnamdi Show.
Looking around the Internet you won’t find a lot of praise for Weingarten, though Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss recently wrote a piece headlined “The nutty demonization of Randi Weingarten” defending her. In that piece Joe Williams, director of the political action committee Democrats for Education Reform, says, “It struck me that if things are going to get this kooky as a result of Waiting for Superman, it makes a discussion impossible.” Oops. That doesn’t sound good. So you’re telling me the film worked to the point radical behavior is going to curb problem solving? Noted.
Personally, I think the charter school idea as presented in Waiting for Superman is a good one, just not for everyone, so I don’t see it as a permanent fix. The film doesn’t come right out and say charter schools are the best way to go, but it definitely leans that direction. However, I did like the film’s comparisons to the amount of money spent on prison inmates each year. The comparison used is $33,000 a year for a prisoner to $8,300 a year for a student to be sent to private schooling in Pennsylvania. Keep those numbers in mind while reading this excerpt from Roger Ebert’s review of the film:
What struck me most of all was Geoffrey Canada’s confidence that a charter school run on his model can make virtually any first-grader a high school graduate who’s accepted to college. A good education, therefore, is not ruled out by poverty, uneducated parents or crime- and drug-infested neighborhoods. In fact, those are the very areas where he has success. Consider this: Those lotteries are truly random, as by law they must be. Yet most of the winners will succeed, and half the losers (from the same human pool) will fail. This is an indictment: Our schools do not work.
Just as the film draws the connection to lack of education and criminal behavior, Ebert makes a paragraph full of great points until his final five words: Our schools do not work. Yeah, when compared to six days a week of private schooling, no Roger, they don’t work. Ebert continues:
Here is my modest proposal: Spend less money on prisons and more money on education. Reduce our military burden and put that money into education. In 20 years, you would have more useful citizens, less crime and no less national security. It’s so simple.
It is so simple. Why haven’t we done this? Why, let’s march up to Washington right now and throw this on the President’s desk! I assume Roger is leading the way?
With that on the table let’s turn to Inside Job because pounding on the government’s front door appears to be the only option with this one as well. Ferguson puts all the villains on display, names those that won’t cooperate and beats us into a bloody pulp with facts and figures that will make you want to slit your wrists. Essentially, It could be called Waiting for “Superman” 2: The Man of Steel Isn’t Coming.
A visit to Inside Job‘s official site greets you with the following quote from Mary and Richard Corliss at Time Magazine, “If you’re not ENRAGED by the end of the movie, you weren’t paying attention.” Oh man, someone get me a ticket! I can only assume after I see it Mary, Rich and I are going to head on over to our local state government and call for change and after that we’ll start a movement and take it all the way to the White House! Oh wait, no we won’t. I’ll just go home and sit in my apartment, mad at the world around me.
I recently posted on Twitter the following message: “So, is Inside Job the scariest film of the year and Waiting for ‘Superman’ the saddest?” It’s absolutely true, no matter if Paranormal Activity 2 is able to freak me out it won’t be for more than a few minutes while the knowledge people in Washington and Wall Street are so entwined the chances of anything being done in the near or even distant future is doubly frightening. As for the sadness experienced in Waiting for “Superman”, just you wait until you see it and find out (**documentary spoiler alert**) only one of the five children followed throughout the film actually wins the lottery to get into her school and it just so happens to be the young white girl living in a $1+ million house. Sure, Anthony (about as charming a young man as you’re going to meet) got in after surviving the waiting list, but damn if that wasn’t a way to kill all hope at the end of a film.
Then again, if you’re looking for hope, you won’t find it in Inside Job either. Like Rich and Mary said, you’ll only be enraged and, even worse, you’ll be left to feel absolutely helpless. Here’s a documentary that does an excellent job explaining the ins and outs of the 2008 economic crisis and how it happened, but come to the end of the picture you’re left with only one realization… you can’t do a damned thing about it.
Gayle MacDonald of the Globe and Mail writes about Inside Job saying, “Get ready to get angry, but also squirm with delight when he turns his camera on a legion of unsuspecting bankers, market regulators and Ivy League deans whose greed and narcissism led to a financial calamity that – without regulation – could erupt again.” The only problem is she left out one fact, after the camera is turned off these unsuspecting bankers, market regulators and Ivy League deans go home to their money and forget this documentary ever existed.
Ed Douglas at Coming Soon says audiences will be better off “by knowing what you’ll learn by paying attention.” What have I learned that will make me better off? The fact that a bunch of fat cats swindled a whole lot of people out of their money and for the most part got away with it?
As eye-opening pieces of non-fiction, these documentaries are excellent. They can be educational and fill you with knowledge, but isn’t enacting change the overall goal here? To Douglas’s point I will agree people will be better off if they finally learn buying a $500,000 house with no money down is a bad idea if they make $35,000 a year, but beyond that the facts of the matter are simply facts.
For example, another one of 2010’s highly acclaimed documentaries was Lucy Walker’s Countdown to Zero, which spouted off a whole bunch of facts about nuclear weapons and then asked people on the street how many there should be. “ZERO!” they all proclaimed. To this we say… what? “Yah! No more nukes!”
The fact is there will never be worldwide nuclear disarmament and even if everyone says they have destroyed all their nukes (and you believe them) there still won’t be nuclear disarmament because once everyone has none, someone is gonna want to have one.
So what does make a good documentary? What makes an important documentary? Are there such a things as important documentaries or is it merely a bunch of people standing from afar saying, “Yup, that’s a BIG problem and someone needs to do something about it,” just before they hop in their car and drive down the freeway at 70 miles an hour updating their Facebook status to tell the world about the great documentary they just saw and what they’ll be picking up from Taco Bell for dinner?
I want to make it clear, I am not condemning anyone for finding these films great or for not rushing out to get involved and Take Part. I am not one to talk on those matters as my charitable efforts are nothing to brag about. This isn’t about telling people what they should do, that’s not my place. It’s a matter of trying to properly examine these documentaries.
As a movie critic I have found many documentaries to be quite excellent, The Tillman Story being the most recent, but how many documentaries rise above being excellent movies and become socially important? When people walk out of Waiting for “Superman” saying how great it is what does that mean? It’s great… how? The film definitely has intentions of stirring emotions, but I think it aims for something much higher… action. Can it be accomplished?
