It's summer and with blockbuster films dominating the screens, I am reminded about one of the things that's great about my hometown, Montclair, New Jersey. It's the Montclair Film Festival that takes place every May. This urban suburb of 38,000 residents, home to many spectacular million dollar Victorian mansions, is also one of the state's economically and racially integrated municipalities.
Our film festival has become an increasingly important one not only for those who want to see great films before their release in theaters, DVD, Netflix and On Demand, but also showcases films that deal with controversial political and social issues.
Two of the most provocative films in this year's Montclair festival were Time Out of Mind and One That Got Away.
Both expose the strength and weaknesses of most films that cry out for viewers to do something about affordable housing, education, poverty and justice.
Richard Gere, who appeared at this years festival, stars in Time Out of Mind as a man suddenly rendered homeless, struggling with the painful experiences and indignities suffered by man without a job, a home, a family and hope.
Beginning in the 1980s, after President Reagan's massive federal housing cutbacks, government deregulation and gentrification in many cities, homelessness has become an intractable national problem and a central theme in many popular movies and documentaries.
Gere's performance in Time Out of Mind reminds me of Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Francis Phelan in Ironweed, a film based on William Kennedy's novel. Nicholson became immersed in his character, a vagabond who abandoned his family after accidentally killing his infant son. Gere, too, sinks himself in his character. You can feel his grinding, hand-to-mouth dreariness and isolation that comes from being disconnected from his family and work. You feel the indignity he faces when forced to endure long waits and the hail of questions about his personal history just to get a bed for the night and a voucher for a meal at the homeless shelter.
Earlier worthwhile films had tackled the subject of homelessness theme. Terry Gilliam's, 1991 movie, Fisher King, about a radio DJ, who becomes despondent after he gives advice to a deranged listener who then goes on a shooting splurge. The DJ finds salvation in helping a homeless man who was an unwitting victim of the caller. A 2009 film, the Soloist, was based on the true story of a talented African-American musician who suffered from schizophrenia and became homeless. Many critics praised the film. WSJ's Joe Morgenstern praised the film for its willingness to explore "such mysteries of the mind and heart as the torture that madness can inflict, and the rapture that music can confer."
In the Overnighters, released last year, director Jesse Moss, focuses on the thousands of unemployed men lured to North Dakota, where hydraulic fracturing in the Bakken Shale fields, promises to make them rich so they can support the families. Instead many end up homeless and destitute.
Out of Mind fits the pattern of these good movies by encouraging awareness of issues the homeless face. Because Gere's character is complex and sympathetic, it raises the issue of whether he is a victim of forces beyond his control or a man whose plight is due to a failure of character. The film revolves around the damaged relationship between father and daughter reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, as that film centered on a lost soul's despairing last hope for redemption.
The film challenges viewers to consider who is responsible for the epidemic of homelessness on the streets of every American city? In society's terms, is Gere's character, in the words of historian Michael Katz, one of the "deserving" rather than the "undeserving" poor? Do the homeless choose their destiny, as President Ronald Reagan once said?
A weakness of the film is that many of the homeless are not lost souls, but rather victims of choices made by policy-makers who decide whether to provide adequate funding for low-income housing, to set the minimum wage at a level that allow people to make ends meet, provide necessary funds to address the problems of mental illness,
Moreover, like most films about the housing crisis, Out of Mind offers no solutions to the epidemic of homelessness. Nor does it provide the audience with any clue about what they can do to alleviate this problem other than to donate spare change to homeless vagrants or volunteer at a soup kitchen or shelter. As a result, viewers finish the film feeling hopeless. That is surely not what the director Oren Moverman had in mind when he set out to make a film on this topic
The most discussed film at this year's festival was the One That Got Away, directed and produced by Montclair residents John Block and Steven McCarthy, both former NBC News producers.
The 70-minute documentary film follows the relationship between one of Montclair's most admired middle school teachers, Dan Gill, and his former student Tourrie Moses, a handsome, bright, and gifted African-America, who was president of his middle school class. But in 2009, when he was 19, Moses was no longer a promising student with a bright future. That year he got arrested in connection with a gang-driven Christmas Eve shooting of teenage Jersey resident and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence n East Jersey State Prison in Woodbridge Township for the manslaughter and aggravated assault.
Like Out of Mind, the film explores a perplexing social problem, the school-to-prison pipeline that has snared thousands of young African-American men. Through dramatic and touching interviews with teachers, families and friends the movie asks why Moses ended up in jail? Who is responsible? How did he go from an excellent, charming student to a gang member and prisoner? Or as Gill puts in the movie, becoming "the one that got away."
Over a three-year period the filmmakers interviewed Moses' parents and friends, and his teachers at Glenfield middle school (all white), as well as a lengthy dramatic conversation with Moses at the prison. The interviews reveal the teachers and friend's faces as they react to the tragedy, emotionally drawing the audience in. At the showing I attended, the film touched nearly everyone watching, bringing tears to many eyes in the theater.
The film provides a big service effectively dramatizing the tragic story of one school-to-prison pipeline victim, and also by debunks the myth that teachers are to blame for kids who go wrong. Moses had dedicated, superior middle school educators.
This important film was not without flaws. There are too many talking heads, some go on too long, and I occasionally felt like I was watching a 60 Minutes episode. Also, I doubt that Moses is the only Montclair lower-income African-American student that "got away."
It leaves one myth dangling by implying that Moses went wrong because of his parent's poor character. His mother was drug addict, his father a hard-nosed, ex-con. His parenting method seemed to solely rely on the negative experiences that his son would learn from the school of hard knocks. Not great parents.
Here's the problem. We don't know much about Moses' parents and the experiences that may have shaped them to become problem parents who had few psychological or economic resources to help their brilliant son overcome the huge obstacles in his path. We learn little about their work history, how they dealt with the racism they had to confront in their lives The film fails even to ask the question about why Moses's parents went to prison and became drug addicts. Was it something in their genes or inherent in their culture that made them go wrong?
Or might it have something to do with the fact that our country, despite gains produced by the civil rights movement, many working class blacks face both overt and subtle racism, including housing, job and school discrimination, high unemployment government policies, and the growth of the prison-industrial complex that promotes mass incarceration of young black men.
At one point, the film interviews Moses's paternal grandmother, a wonderful opportunity to understand how Moses's father was shaped into a long-term convict. The interviewer asks nothing about that. Another time, the interviewer, a white male, elicits tough talk from the prison-hardened father. The man implies he doesn't hesitate to deal with his problems through violence. The interviewer then asks, "Should I be afraid of you?" It's a dramatic moment, but because the film fails to understand the father, it's a cheap shot. It's likely that a racist prison system shaped the father into a brutal man. The viewers are left only with the image of a frightful black man who ruined his young son's life.
Parenting counts and counts a lot. But the film leaves us with the impression that the school-to-prison pipeline problem can be solved if black parents will learn how to raise their children.
The film does raise other issues. Why do we have school systems that suspend and expel black students at a much higher rate then they do white students who also break the rules or engage in disruptive behavior? Why are these students forced out of school and sent back to harmful home environments and neighborhoods, rather than being provided with educational alternatives?
But the film also fails to raise more fundamental issues; why do we still have so many harmful neighborhoods that lead youngsters to become hardened, confused, embittered, stigmatized and who think that the only way to be somebody is to drop out of school and commit crimes in their communities?
Yet the movie was a success in the sense that it made the viewers feel the terrible tragedy represented by the incarceration of yet another young black man, from the streets, in this case, of my hometown, Montclair, New Jersey.
John Atlas, author of Seeds of Change, the story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Anti-poverty Group, is working on a Sundance Institute funded documentary that's directed by Sam Pollard and Reuben Atlas about the poverty, democracy, and politics through the work of ACORN.
A similar post was originally published in the Newark Star Ledger on July 3, 2015