Anger deep in the heart of Texas

[Guest guest]

Anger deep in the heart of Texas

Mar. 17, 2006. 07:06 AM

GEOFF PEVERE

 

AUSTIN, TEX.?You hear it everywhere you go here: Austin ain't like the

rest of Texas. You hear it from filmmakers, South by Southwest festival

volunteers, waiters and convenience store clerks. You hear it from

visitors, residents, refugees from other parts of the state and cab

drivers. Boy, do you hear it from cab drivers.

 

Last night, en route back to my highway hotel from a screening downtown,

the taxi driver unleashed a completely unsolicited litany of charges

against the administration of George W. Bush. Bush originally came to

power here in the state capital as the Governor of Texas, but just about

everybody wants you to know that George W. Bush doesn't represent

Austin. And Austin ain't like the rest of Texas.

 

But you wouldn't have to spend much time in restaurants, line-ups,

convenience stores and especially cabs to suspect that's true. All you

have to do is watch a couple of movies in SXSW to get the sneaking

suspicion that this is not Bush country.

 

If documentaries are the heart of the film stream of this event, then

the energy driving most of them is a shared conviction that there's

something sick in the American soul. Since I arrived here a week ago,

I've seen movies about the epidemic in debilitating credit card debt

(Maxed Out); the increasingly common phenomenon of getting dumped,

outsourced, downsized or just plain canned from your job (Fired!); the

decline of American popular music (Before the Music Dies); the imminent

collapse of the international oil industry (OilCrash); the painful

political coming of age of a liberal former TV comedian (Al Franken: God

Spoke); the explosion of the private military industry (Shadow Company);

the death of the mythical frontier (The Last Western); the corporate

foreclosure of an American broadcasting institution (Robert Altman's

fictional, but in this context fitting, A Prairie Home Companion); and

even a movie about one man's lifelong struggle just to get some shuteye

(Wide Awake). And what's keeping him from sleeping? He's reading the

news too much. America is messing with his serenity.

 

The current surge in American independent documentary production, which

SXSW represents with such convincing on-screen evidence, may be the

result of technology? it's easier and cheaper than ever to make a

non-fiction movie. But it's also the result of an apparent shared

determination to speak out against a world gone wrong. Over and over

again in interviews, filmmakers were telling me that they were inspired

to make their movies because they'd suspected that the things that were

bothering them were larger problems than they thought. And, as they

proceeded to research their movies, they learned they were right. There

were a lot of people out there who were feeling similarly anxious, and

who wanted, no needed, to talk about it.

 

Annabelle Gurwitch, the writer, producer and first-person voice of

Fired!, learned that getting dumped from a play by no less a dumper than

Woody Allen was merely symptomatic of a vast experience in corporate

America. Her movie leads her from the hermetic world of New York

middlebrow theatre to the exponentially downsizing assembly lines of

middle America.

 

Nick Bicanic, Vancouver-based co-director of Shadow Company, began his

investigation of the burgeoning military contracting industry by simply

wondering what kinds of guys comprised the estimated 20,000 freelance

soldiers currently at work in Iraq. And he was surprised by what he

learned ? both about the industry and about those who profited from it.

In a way, his movie, like Gurwitch's, is about people just trying to

find work in a drastically changing global economy.

 

Then there's James Scurlock's powerfully moving but decidedly unsettling

Maxed Out (which won a prize here Tuesday night). Also inspired by the

filmmaker's simple curiosity about just what got people so deeply and

irrecoverably in debt, Maxed Out traces a similar,

abstract-to-individual journey. His movie makes such a powerful

indictment against a financial industry that preys on the weak and

vulnerable, with an utter lack of either moral or judicial restraint,

because it's anchored in the frequently wrenching testimonies of the

people at the bottom. The problem may be big, but the pain is personal.

 

It's the people who stick with you after watching these documentaries.

And it's the people who remind you that any country, anywhere, is really

just a collection of individuals doing their best to get by. And these

days, the means to do that are becoming both scarce and scary. These are

the true " stars " of this particular film festival in this conspicuously

exceptional city deep in the heart of Texas. They are the average

Americans who worry and suffer for the country that has let them down.

 

But they're not suffering in silence any more. They're speaking out.

They're mad and when Americans get mad, they revolt. Any Austin cab

driver will tell you as much.

 

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