The Work is an emotionally-powerful non-narrative documentary that puts the viewer in the position of an ethnographic researcher acting as a participant-observer. The film waffles in tone, but with good reason and better results; it covers both breathless moments of pure chaos and yawn-inducing expositional interludes, fluidly shifting from one to the other in a way that keeps the viewer engaged and informed, but still usefully distant and a bit confused.
The Work traces a four-day group therapy session at New Folsom penitentiary in California, where members of the public spend the day in either small group or one-on-one/one-on-two conversations with convicted felons serving their sentences at the prison. These conversations are intense: the inmates discuss their crimes, their struggles with interned life and/or their contemplations upon their lives. The members of the public are untrained neophytes, often laden with their own emotional burdens and psychological stresses. There is lots of shouting and shrieking, a plethora of profane threats and provocations and wide-eyed stares.
But such moments are far overshadowed by the quieter and more human ones. There are so many tears here. Inmates speak of suicidal ambitions, of fear of mourning the death of family members lest they appear weak and of infinite regret and hopeless despair. The men from the public discuss their sense of directionlessness out in society or the crush of feeling inferior to those they share workplaces with.
What The Work ultimately portrays is connection. People in this film connect through empathy, reconciliation, solidarity and just genuine kindness and social generosity. Most of the inmates are not accustomed to being talked to as members of the human community; many of the members of the public, too, yearn for authentic conversations and connections that elude them in the broader world. In coming together, each group lifts up the other and elevates the humanity of all involved.
The Work implicitly posits multiple theses about contemporary US society and nearly all of them are quite radical. The film questions the current system of punitive justice and mandatory sentences, for instance, even though the prisoners depicted here are truly violent offenders with deep histories of murder or attempted murder. The Work does not explicitly argue, however; as an ethnographic work, it leaves interpretation solely to the viewer.
The most salient argument of The Work is not about prisons, socioeconomic inequality, gang culture, race or urban development—though the film does touch on each of those themes—but rather is about masculinity. Everyone in the film is a man: there are neither women nor juveniles ever on screen. In the group sessions being observed, all of the conversations radiate around the topic of manliness: what does it mean to be a man? Most of the discussants have the same fundamental issue on this point: they know what a man is “supposed” to be and they know how to perform that role, but they find that role and their performance of it hollow and terrifying. It is hollow because they are unable to fully realize the ideal, and, more importantly, because they are not convinced that the ideal “Man” is really all that great of a thing to aspire to be. They find it terrifying because they are surrounded, both inside the prison and in society in general, by other posturing men also trying to perform that role and each of these men is worried that he will be the one discovered to be a fraud. No man in the film wants to be the one outed as a phony. The consequences of this toxic masculinity are manifold, both in the film and in the real world. How much of the violence for which these men are in prison can be traced back to the way in which masculinity is defined? The Work shows the incredible power of what happens when the performance of masculinity is abandoned for genuine expression and life.
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