It has been said that films do not exist in a vacuum, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that film release windows do not occur in a vacuum. This is a roundabout way of saying that the experience of viewing The Reunited States in 2021 (more specifically, in this writer’s case, on the final day of the outgoing administration) is akin to hearing a strange and inscrutable dispatch from a distant planet.
The concept of director Ben Rekhi’s documentary is to follow a handful of political voices as they seek to build unity in the Democratic and Republican (and, broadly speaking, liberal and conservative) divide across the United States. In an idealistic way, this is a welcome gesture. We should seek to close such gaps in the political and social chasms that have helped to establish a nation that is, as one of the subjects says in essentially the film’s opening line, more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Here is a group of people who are very close to understanding why, but who are not quite there yet.
Some of these stories, of which there are four, are given more time than others to reveal themselves to us. The short-changed ones belong to Steven Olikara, the Wisconsinite founder and creator of the Millennial Action Project, and Greg Orman, an Independent who ran for governor of Kansas in 2018. Olikara sought to create the first bipartisan caucus of young members of Congress, despite the elemental pushback from those who doubted such a thing was possible or desirable. Orman ran an ultimately unsuccessful but earnest campaign, losing to Democrat Laura Kelly (after, by the way, losing a race for Senate to Republican Pat Roberts).
Olikara’s story is the one here with the most promise, not only because he is a generous interview subject but also because he is the one putting his ideas into action. Rekhi, in his haste to get back to some of the flashier storylines, never really gives us a sense of who Olikara is outside of this context, though. The same fate befalls Orman, whose plans to mediate between members of each party (we see him making similar promises to two groups of potential voters, each of whom has strikingly different political views) are respectable but shortsighted, and the film doesn’t seem to find any reason to challenge that idea.
The most moving story here belongs to Susan Bro, who lost her daughter, activist Heather Heyer, in the protest-turned-riot that erupted and resulted in a car attack in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. She has worked tirelessly to reconcile the high-profile murder of her white daughter with the fight for racial injustice after the events awakened her to those struggles. Bro is a more cautious interview subject than Olikara, but her mission also has the biggest question mark, in terms of what the film is trying (and, in large part, failing) to communicate. If she finds enough common ground among a populace that sees the tragedy from afar but not the struggle up close, what exactly does that mean for her daughter’s legacy? Bro has no clue, and Rekhi simply asks the question without the conviction to confront it.
Finally, there are David and Erin Leaverton. He was a Republican staffer until the 2016 election, in which they both voted for Donald Trump in large part due to their perception of the Democratic Party as the “enemies.” Disgusted by the rupture within the Republican Party, the two left behind their jobs, family and home to buy an RV and travel to each of the 48 contiguous states and Alaska. Along the way, those perceptions and a lifetime of nurture are challenged by regular citizens. David, who initially dislikes and distrusts the phrase “white privilege” on principle, and Erin, who similarly distrusted any reason to utter the sentence, “Black lives matter,” do transform on this journey ― but mostly for themselves and the podcast that results.
The lessons learned by the Leavertons are elementary ones, in other words, and although the movie acknowledges that there is a long way to go until unity is a reality, it mostly dismisses the suggestion that such a state is virtually impossible, given the extremism of what has become “mainstream” in one of these parties. Since the filming of this documentary, we have had a pair of Presidential impeachments (for the same man), a thoroughly mishandled pandemic and an insurrection at the heart of the democratic process. Sure, the subjects of The Reunited States are trapped in the film’s timeline and are not aware of any of that, but the argument made by Rekhi and his film is universal: There must be unity, achieved with vague intentions. That is quite the pipe dream.
The post The Reunited States appeared first on Spectrum Culture.