Some documentaries unite, rather than divide, and become box office champions as a result. The most conspicuous example this summer is the lovely Fred Rogers tribute "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" Morgan Neville's film has made more than $20 million in its domestic release, a remarkable figure.
It appeals to an unusually wide political spectrum, from liberals to moderate conservatives eager to reminisce about "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." Audiences have marveled anew at what it meant to have such a gentle, reassuring presence (a lifelong registered Republican) dominating so many years of children's programming supported, in part, by the federal government.
The Rogers documentary poster depicts its subject putting on a bright red sweater over a nice white shirt and a big blue tie, against a blue backdrop with clear white lettering. It's the red, white and blue of the stars and stripes. The poster sells an image of smiling, kindhearted American celebrity. Mr. Rogers is so far removed from today's viciously divided political climate, he may as well be science fiction.
Other documentaries are dividers, not uniters. There's money to be made in the documentary realm simply by playing to your base. You can get a strong dose of nonfiction advocacy that way, if there's a real filmmaker behind the camera. But there's also money to be made by sloshing around in sloppy, unsupported generalities and hogwash.
Take, for example, the latest brand extension from right-wing author, filmmaker and Trump presidential pardon recipient Dinesh D'Souza. Now in theaters, "Death of a Nation" is based on two D'Souza books, "The Big Lie" and "Death of a Nation," both of which strike back at "the tyranny of the left" and the persistent "big lie," D'Souza says in voice-over, that "today Democrats are the good guys and Trump and the Republicans are the bad guys."
The film is filled out to feature length by cheesy historical re-enactments of everything from pre-Civil War slave auctions to Hitler in his bunker. Hitler, by the way, was a lefty, according to "Death of a Nation." "American progressives cheered Hitler's rise to power," D'Souza states at one point, in the first of many such characterizations. Anticipating our response to that assertion, he adds: "That is the crushing historical truth."
The film's poster image blends the famous faces of two Republican presidents: Lincoln and Trump. They share the same moral fortitude and God-given destiny, D'Souza's film argues. (Godlessness is akin to societal fascism, in D'Souza's universe.) "Trump has Lincoln's inner toughness," he says," in a different sort of historical truth-crushing. "Democrats were the party of tyranny and enslavement in Lincoln's time, and they are the party of tyranny and enslavement now."
There are those who might approach D'Souza's theses with a measure of skepticism. I might be one of them. To be fair, D'Souza acknowledges that he's in the bag for Trump straight off; his 2016 documentary "Hillary's America" did its bit to keep Clinton out of the White House. "I was happy (Trump) won," D'Souza coos, in his patented golly-gosh intonation. "And my film ... played a role."
"Death of a Nation," designed to help get the Republicans through the midterm elections in good shape, amounts to a thank-you note to the man who pardoned the filmmaker earlier this year. In May Trump effectively erased D'Souza 2014 guilty plea to charges of illegal campaign contributions to a Republican New York Senate candidate. "Death of a Nation" is the least D'Souza could do in return.
Make no mistake: D'Souza's brand of conservative ideology makes money. "Hillary's America" pulled in $13 million; an earlier D'Souza smear campaign, "2016: Obama's America," grossed $33 million. The movies' aesthetics don't matter. The seething hysterics don't matter; in fact, they're the selling point. D'Souza's on-camera interview shtick _ his "I'm really listening, hard" reaction shots, or his nervous, Fox News-honed interruptions of somebody he can't abide _ is practically a style unto itself.
Sketchy hyperbole and hacky stylistic flourishes, however, know no political boundaries. Opening Aug. 17, "Alt-Right: Age of Rage" comes from filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough, whose earlier work includes the controversial Lil' Wayne documentary "The Carter."
Lough's inarguably a more skillful filmmaker than D'Souza, which says next to nothing. But he makes a lot of the same mistakes. In "Alt-Right," Lough focuses on two emblematic sides of what happened a year ago before, during and after the inflammatory Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. The film chronicles the activities and preparations of a clearly positioned good guy, Antifa activist Daryle Lamont Jenkins, and, on a parallel track, a baldly obvious bad guy, white supremacist (or "white nationalist," depending on your tolerance for euphemism) Richard Spencer. He's best known as the guy who got clocked on camera on Trump's inauguration day.
"Alt-Right" and "Death of a Nation" exploit images of the lethal Charlottesville violence to different ends. D'Souza paints the Charlottesville riots as a mainly Democratic provocation _ the left's "one last card" to play, as he phrases it, in the battle for the soul of America. (In a movie full of reaches, this is one of the reachiest.) Lough sees and shows Charlottesville the other way, as a direct result of Trump's increasingly sinister rhetoric.
"Alt-Right" may be less prone to insane leaps of logic and faith than "Death of a Nation," but both films search in vain for clear, cogent, complicated readings of where we are today in our ongoing national tantrum. Also, both films nearly suffocate on some of the lamest "scary" mood music in documentary history. In "Alt-Right," Trump's inauguration reassurances to "the forgotten men and women" of America are underscored by an out-of-tune saloon piano, suggesting vaguely apocalyptic danger. (Do we need music to suggest that anymore?) In "Death of a Nation," D'Souza's adoring supplications come equipped with more angelic, honorific orchestral blather than an entire year's worth of History Channel programming. Both documentaries rely on a too-small pool of interview subjects, letting those subjects gas on and on.
D'Souza and Lough agree on one thing, though: Richard Spencer's a tool. The off-camera Lough lets Spencer make his own case against himself, as he struggles to frame his plainly racist beliefs in ways both attention-getting and sober-sounding.
In "Death of a Nation," D'Souza chides Spencer for his "Hail Trump!" speech back in 2016, which provoked more than a few Nazi salutes in response. That's just giving the mainstream media "what they want!" D'Souza whines. Not good for the Republican brand. Not good.
Both "Alt-Right" and "Death of a Nation" give their respective bases what they want. That's not enough. Lough's film, I'd say, is almost good. D'Souza's is beneath contempt.
