One of the more frustrating consequences of the 2016 Presidential election is an obsessive national hand-wringing on the part of so-called “coastal elites” to understand so-called “Red State America.” Among the more pernicious products of this recent obsession are the rise of self-aggrandizing snake-oil salesmen like J.D. Vance who traffic in simple one-note characterizations of the flyover states. Because the folks who live on the coasts really do seem to be completely uninformed of their fellow nationals in the middle of the country, the nonsense peddled by the likes of Vance gains cultural credibility. The desire to understand the people who live in such spots as Kansas or Kentucky, besides relying on untrustworthy narrators, is itself driven by a patronizing urge on the part of New Yorkers to “figure out what went wrong” with the rest of us, which is precisely the sort of elitist snobbery that led to people in Alabama to vote for Trump in the first place.
This is the context of Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, wherein the octogenarian documentarian descends from his coastal perch onto the Plains with his signature style of quiet witness. Wiseman is not prone to the kneejerk silliness that plagues most enterprises to evaluate the Trump states, and many viewers may see such restraint—omnipresent in his nearly four dozen previous films—as culpability in not taking Trump supporters to task. But this is the wrong reading of Monrovia, Indiana, which is more political than any Wiseman effort in decades. In fact, Wiseman goes out of his way to treat his subjects in the film harshly. This is a deliberately unflattering portrait that, paradoxically, both humanizes the people of Monrovia while subtly shaming and humiliating them. It is a far more useful approach than Vance’s, but it is still, fundamentally, the representation and interpretation of Hoosiers rather than allowing such people to speak for themselves. For a more genuine exploration, viewers still have to rely on the 30-year-old God’s Country, it seems.
Wiseman does not break new ground, aesthetically, in this film. His approach resembles the one he has long been famous for applying: beautiful ethereal establishing shots framing very long takes of everyday people doing their usual activities. In Monrovia, Indiana, his camera finds its way into the local high school, the barber shop, the tattoo parlor, the kitchen of the pizza joint, the Masonic lodge, multiple city council meetings and the local IGA (that is an independent grocery, if you are a reader who grew up in a town with at least a five-figure population), among others. Many of these scenes are entrancing—the city council being lectured on fire hydrants by a rightfully upset citizen—while others are snooze-inducing—those poor Masons—which is again standard in a Wiseman film.
But Monrovia, Indiana does show viewers something new about Wiseman. Whereas he usually comes across as genuine, curious, generous and patient while also instilling such values in the viewer, the subtext of this film is downright mean. The usual Wiseman spirit is not wholly absent. Particularly in the myriad scenes depicting various agricultural enterprises—these include rounding up the pigs for their final truck ride (the best sequence in the film), taking milled corn to market and a farm machinery auction—the director comes across as his normal, this-is-interesting-so-let’s-toss-it-in-the-film self. And his inherent kindness shines through in a few scenes of conversations between elderly locals in Monrovia’s lone café.
In most of the other scenes, however, there is a vindictiveness lurking. Monrovia, Indiana serves as something of a Bingo of flyover-state stereotypes: a city councilwoman using racial coding to justify her policies, a fundamentalist preacher oblivious of the boredom of his congregants, a guy playing a banjo, lots of frying and fried food, the words “federal government” used as a slur, an overemphasis on sports in the high school and, of course, the gun shop. Look, I lived in Indiana for a decade and grew up in a town of barely 50 souls in the foothills of Kentucky Appalachia, so I get it. Some of what Wiseman includes here is unavoidable: he merely caught on camera what the councilwoman said, Hoosiers really do wear too much camouflage and even I was giggling in anticipation of the eventual and inevitable stop at the gun shop. But much of it is gratuitous. A few examples include the sound design incorporating the cashier at the liquor store reading off the amounts people were spending on booze, the camera lingering longer on overweight people in slow pans and a focus on a stand at a street carnival selling car emblems with particularly hateful messages. As if all Hoosiers are fat alcoholics whining about their taxes going towards welfare payments.
What is more damning is what Wiseman does not show: there are no people enjoying outdoor recreation, no culturally or politically progressive people or anything to stem the overwhelming tide of red-state stereotypes. It is as if Wiseman is suggesting that Monrovia is some backwards enclave where all the concerns are local and the people all have terrible, outmoded tastes, which is ridiculous: Monrovia, Indiana is a half-hour drive from Indianapolis! It is far from an isolated hovel ignorant of the broader world, through which outsiders never pass. Where are the open-minded people, the vegetarians, the library and all the other features of a normal 21st century small town?
Among efforts on the part of coastal elites to “understand” those who live in flyover country, Monrovia, Indiana is a standout for its subtlety and humanism. But it still comes across as paternalistic and often cruel, because those aspects are just intrinsic to such projects. Because this is Wiseman, in between the problematic scenes are still hidden gems that are funny, endearing, informative or just pitch-perfect portraits of quotidian Americana, and the cinematography remains gorgeous. This is not a documentary to simply cast aside, but it is not of the quality viewers have come to expect of Wiseman.
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