Taking a break from watching the news by going on a documentary binge is like flying to Miami to get away from the sun. Two of these movies depressed the hell out of me. One of them left me sad, angry and inspired. All of them are worth your time.
Casting JonBenet This Netflix original is about a group of actors auditioning for a movie based on the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey. The movie doesn’t exist, of course, and the result is a heavy-meta, hall-of-mirrors approach to one of the world’s most regrettable media circuses. One on hand, the actors’ multi-filtered accounts of accounts of accounts befit a case that has been chewed up by incompetence and speculation for 20 years. When they inevitably share their own brushes with abuse and death, the filmmakers’ point is clear: The only truth in the JonBenét saga lies in whatever it kicks up within us.
But this movie establishes an echo chamber that’s depressing and suspect. Actors wax about why they’re right for this or that role, pre-teen actresses try to eat cookies while getting painted up and sprayed down, and somewhere off in the near-distance, the band plays on.
Risk If information is meaningless in the Ramsey case, it’s the only thing of value for Julian Assange. In Risk, shot from 2010 to the present by Laura Poitras, the Academy Award-winning documentarian behind Citizenfour, Assange hoards it like water during the apocalypse—pressing a smartphone and digital recorder to the same ear, meeting with a lawyer while crouching in the bushes (and still looking over this shoulder), snapping pictures through the curtains of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been trapped since 2012. The movie starts as a profile of a noble, semi-chic whistleblower. (Lady Gaga pays him a visit.) But things get muddy when he sizes up a series of sexual-assault allegations as a “feminist” conspiracy. They get worse when James Comey suggests the Russians used WikiLeaks to influence last year’s election.
Assange comes off as unlikable throughout, but is he a misogynist hypocrite who colluded with the Russians, or a flawed man of principle? Risk can’t answer these question, as its story’s still being told. Besides, you’re too preoccupied with scarier thoughts, like how solutions are often worse than the problem, and why people driven by admirable values often cause the worst damage.
I Am Not Your Negro Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, this essay on race in America is based on notes for James Baldwin’s Remember This House, an unfinished book about the assassinations of Medgar Evars, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—all friends of Baldwin. Maybe it’s because the last civil rights drama I watched was the rather gussied-up Hidden Figures, but this early-’60s footage of good ol’ boys waving Confederate flags and spitting on black high-school students feels more disgusting than ever.
Unlike the tales of Julian and JonBenét, Negro is an incentive, not a deterrent. Baldwin—his presence unflinching, his voice in complete command—knows he is not the problem. “I am not a ni**er, I am a man,” he says in a TV interview. “But if you think I am a ni**er, that means you need it, and you’ve got to find out: Why?” The future of this country will forever hang on that question.
