Back Row Thoughts – Witness to Truth, Part One

Every year I make it a personal mission to not just see all of the eventual Oscar nominees in each category, but wherever possible, to clear the entire shortlist of semifinalists. This began several years ago with my first attempt to view all 15 films vying for Documentary Feature, and the goal has remained ever since. Sometimes I finish it all, sometimes I don’t, but I always shoot for the accomplishment, and I’ve expanded it to almost every other shortlisted category, in hopes of having as much of the total field as possible processed by the time the nominations come out, so that the viewing portion of the annual Oscar Blitz is as quick and easy as possible. One of these days I’ll have a year where the only work to do will be the three Short Film screenings that happen in February.

As of the moment I’m writing this, I’ve seen 14 of the 15 candidates. I could have seen the last one (In the Rearview) last Sunday at a special screening, but I spaced on the date and missed it. As such, since the movie hasn’t been publicly released yet, I either have to get lucky and find another event screening or wait for it to come out in normal theatres. If it winds up being nominated, the odds go up. If not, I’m guessing I’ll fall short.

In the meantime, though, we have a whole bunch of other hopefuls to get through here on the blog. Through individual reviews and the first part of this year’s Netflix mini-series, I’ve covered six of the shortlisted titles thus far, meaning I have eight in the tank to rate. We’ll handle half of them now, and depending on any viewing opportunities over the next week, cover the remainder in either one or two future posts. As always, I’ll review them in the order I saw them, and if there’s any public release info, I’ll include it in case you want to track down any of these movies.

The Eternal Memory

Distributed domestically by MTV Films, this Chilean documentary had a brief theatrical run, and is now available on Paramount for streaming purposes. That’s about the most detached thing I can say about it, as this one hit me pretty hard, for reasons that will become quickly apparent.

The film is about the relationship between Augusto Góngora and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, who have been together for more than 20 years. Góngora was quite famous in Chile as one of the most stalwart journalists of his era, bravely calling out the atrocities of the Pinochet regime at great risk to himself and his loved ones. Pauli is a well-known actress in Chile, and once a democratic government was installed, she became one of the country’s Ministers of Culture and the Arts. In 2014, Góngora was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Recorded over the course of several years, the movie tracks the progression of his illness, as well as Pauli’s lovingly quixotic attempts to help him maintain what remains of his mind and personality throughout.

This is a hard project to watch, especially if you’re like me and have had to witness a loved one diminish through the various forms of dementia. There are a lot of scenes in this picture that mirror the exact experiences I had with my mom over the course of her final three years of life. There are pleasant days where you can almost sense the person fully realized once again, and it brings you a modicum of happiness and catharsis. There are terrifying days where they question everything around them, convinced through paranoia that someone or something has changed the world around them to play some cruel trick. Then of course there are the heartbreaking moments where they don’t recognize you or even realize who they are anymore.

In painfully honest detail, director Maite Alberdi (previously nominated for The Mole Agent) shows us all of these harrowing milestones, centered on Pauli’s attempts to maintain some degree of normalcy and still hold onto even a shred of the man she loves so dearly. It cleaves your soul to watch it, but you must. The World Health Organization estimates that there are nearly 10 million new dementia cases each year across the globe, so odds are you or someone you know will be affected by it, be it directly or indirectly. And when that happens, you need to know what it looks like, and how to cope.

This film, devastating though it is, provides that crucial perspective. Seeing this is a good explanation as to why I got so angry watching the fictitious Memory. That movie posited a cutesy love story at the relative outset of a man’s prognosis, including sexual relations, from a woman who barely knows him, but still felt comfortable accusing him of rape (even though by having sex with someone not of sound mind, she for all intents and purposes rapes him). Every aspect of that mind-boggling misfire demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the realities of this illness. Pauli and Augusto were together for over two decades, and she still had to tread extremely lightly for even the most elementary shows of affection. Forget sex, there are times where a hug becomes threatening for someone in Augusto’s condition. More importantly, Pauli has to have the patience of a saint to handle every curveball that her husband’s mental degradation throws at her, and she breaks down a fair few times. Meanwhile, Jessica Chastain’s character basically doesn’t even address Peter Sarsgaard’s issues, instead relying on a mentally disabled man to be her rock to handle her emotional problems. That movie is insulting to everyone who’s ever had to deal with this in real life, while this one commits itself to not flinching in the face of truth, no matter how painful. That’s why The Eternal Memory is fantastic, while just plain Memory is shit.

Grade: A-

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

A crowd favorite throughout last year’s festival circuit, Still can currently be seen on AppleTV. It’s already won several Critics’ Choice and Emmy Awards, and should be considered one of the favorites for a nomination. Or at least it would be, if the Documentary Branch had any consistency when it comes to nominating films that the general public actually watches and enjoys.

The premise is fairly straightforward. It’s a look into the life of one our most beloved actors, Michael J. Fox, hobbled at the height of his stardom by the abnormally early onset of Parkinson’s disease. We see how he first came to prominence as a young performer, how he became an overnight sensation in the 1980s, how his life was altered by his diagnosis, and how he’s surviving and even thriving now in spite of it.

It’s incredibly entertaining, because Fox is just that charismatic. Given his clean and cool image for most of his career, it’s oddly endearing just to hear him say “fuck” in candid moments. The level of good humor he maintains would be admirable in any person, and I’d say it was even more so for someone in his situation, but he insists that we as an audience not put that asterisk on him, so I won’t. He’s just a great guy.

The more fascinating parts are when we learn of the ways in which he wasn’t so great. He describes the worst hangover he ever had, waking up to see his hand shaking without him being able to control it as the first sign that something was wrong. He details how he nearly became estranged from wife Tracy Pollan (they met on the set of Family Ties when she was cast to play his girlfriend) because of his drinking and self-loathing in the wake of getting the disease. And most shocking of all, he shows us the lengths he went to in order to hide his condition for seven years before going public. Seeing footage from Mars Attacks! and Spin City where he points out how he kept his twitchy fingers out of frame is astonishing, impressive, and genuinely tragic.

I grew up admiring Fox as a role model, an example of what I wanted to be, especially since I was one of the shorter kids in my class until a growth spurt in high school. When the news of his disease came out, it broke my heart, and honestly to this day I think about him whenever a part of my body spasms without me doing anything to provoke it. So to see in him the fact that life does go on and there is a way to carry on in spite of an immense medical obstacle is inspiring. Sometimes that’s all you need in a documentary.

Grade: A-

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Released on HBO and Max just last week, I’ll admit to a slight degree of disappointment when I saw this film, mostly because I didn’t know who Nikki Giovanni was. Given the title and seeing the visage of an aging black woman in the promotional materials, I thought it was going to be a profile of an unsung pioneer of the Space Race, similar to the women who inspired Hidden Figures. Turns out that’s not nearly what this is about. Instead, it’s a deep dive into the life and work of a great American poet, one with a history of fearlessness and a penchant for courting controversy.

The title is a reference to some of her work (her poems are read by Taraji P. Henson in omniscient narration), where Giovanni muses about how the first human expedition to Mars should consist entirely of black women, because they’re the only people who know how to get shit done, to see a task and get down to it, without all the histrionics and foolishness provided by other various demographics (conservative white men chief among them). In a sense then, it kind of does align with the likes of Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson.

Nikki is an absolute hoot, particularly when conversing with her partner Ginny Fowler and her granddaughter Kai. There’s a wonderful “I don’t give a fuck” attitude to everything she says and does, especially in the here and now, that you can’t help but laugh and cheer. Where the film really succeeds is when it balances these moments with archival footage of an academic debate she had with James Baldwin several decades ago, showing the sharpness of both her mind and her tongue. You likely won’t agree with everything she says – I sure didn’t – but you’ll absolutely love hearing her say it, and processing her perspective through your own individual lens.

Altogether, this is a very fun and thoughtful film. I do wonder how much of an impact it will have with Documentary Branch voters, however. The group is rarely predictable, but often their nomination votes tend to fall within two patterns. Either they nominate what they feel should be a clear winner, with obviously lesser entries alongside it (many of similar theme so as to split votes with the full Academy membership), or they shortlist several films that can be grouped together as having the same subject matter in hopes of getting one of each type through the final cut. Of the 15 semifinalists, four of them deal with examinations of the black experience, three of them focused on the United States. As such, my gut says that this will only get nominated within those limiting contexts. If there’s an obvious winner the branch has in mind, it could get a nod alongside the likes of American Symphony and Stamped from the Beginning to dilute dissenting votes. If there’s not a clear favorite, it would then get in if voters felt it was the best of this subset. I really like this movie, but I don’t think it fits the latter qualification.

Grade: B

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

To piggyback off that last point, I’d categorize the 15 semifinalists into one of five sub-categories based on their subject matter. The first is regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine (20 Days in Mariupol and In the Rearview). After that it’s artistic expression (Apolonia, Apolonia, 32 Sounds, and Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy), affliction (The Eternal Memory, A Still Small Voice, and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie), cultural and political oppression (Beyond Utopia, Four Daughters, and To Kill a Tiger), and the aforementioned black experience. The final entry for tonight is one of only two or three that bridges two of these thematic fields.

Bobi Wine came to prominence in Uganda as a singer and rapper, weaving political messages into his music. Seeing a chance to help make life better for the people in his hometown (a slum) and several others, he ran for Parliament when the local seat was vacated, and won handily. Since then he has been a thorn in the side of the ruling party and President Yoweri Museveni, who came to power shortly after Idi Amin was deposed. Campaigning on a platform of anti-corruption and populist representation, Bobi Wine was one of the leaders of the opposition movement when Museveni lobbied to change the country’s constitution so that he could remain in office beyond the original age limit. Despite Wine’s very vocal efforts, the ruling party’s large majority passed the change, allowing Museveni to potentially be President for life.

In 2019, Wine announced himself as a candidate for President, seeking to end Museveni’s reign, as he argued that the revolutionary spirit with which Museveni came to power has been replaced by entrenched corruption and a thirst for absolute control so great that he’ll do anything possible to silence dissent. Over the course of a two-year grassroots campaign, this film (available on Hulu for those interested) shows just how right Wine was, as he and his supporters are repeatedly arrested on trumped up charges and detained in military prisons where they’re beaten and tortured despite being civilians, all to prevent or torpedo Wine’s candidacy. There’s even a moment where police shoot and kill Wine’s personal driver and arrest Wine for inciting violence. The disgusting irony of the naked authoritarian bullying is palpable.

If you followed this story as it developed in real time, you know the result, especially since the election itself made the news worldwide for the tactics used to rig the outcome. The real lesson to take away, though, is in how these machinations could be – and are – put to use right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Whether you agree with a politician’s platform or not (I don’t even know what Wine’s specific policy stances are), the only way democracy works is if we have an honest campaign and accept the will of the people in free and fair elections. When leaders – and their cronies – don’t have a basic respect for the rule of law and the system we all agree to, the whole thing falls apart, and that’s precisely what a lot of people in positions of power want.

As I’m writing this, the first primary caucus for this year’s presidential election is underway. In that contest, the front-runner to challenge President Biden in November is under indictment in four jurisdictions – both federal and state – and accused of 91 felony counts. He’s doing everything he can to delay court proceedings in hope of regaining office and making the charges (at least the federal ones) go away, and vowing to dismantle all the guardrails that prevented him from assuming dictatorial control when he was in office last time, casually introducing ideas that he’s completely immune from any legal accountability, that he’ll target political opponents if he gets back in, and that military officers who disagree with him should be put to death. As for the two leading alternatives, for what little policy difference they might suggest, they also run on the idea of absolute power and promise to pardon Donald Trump if they win, telling the entire country that laws simply won’t apply to their side of the aisle. Meanwhile, at the state and local level, legislators from this same party have spent the last four years implementing laws that make it harder to vote, that gerrymander racial, social, and political minorities out of the conversation, and that empower them to throw out election results that they personally disagree with, all in the public name of one man and in the private name of maintaining a stranglehold on power despite their waning influence and lack of national support.

Whatever your political leanings, these are facts that simply can’t be ignored. With Bobi Wine: The People’s President, we see how such strategies are executed in real time, turning a threat to the status quo into a political prisoner, and threatening the lives of him, his family, and those who would dare align themselves with him. Uganda is a relatively young and fragile democracy, making it quite susceptible to such chicanery and open hostility. Just because our system is much older doesn’t mean it’s not just as vulnerable, however, and that’s what you should take away from watching this piece of work.

Grade: B+

Join the conversation in the comments below! Have you seen any of these documentaries? Which one was your favorite? What random rating system will the Documentary Branch use to determine their nominees this year? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and YouTube for even more content!