Alexandra Pelosi's new documentary, "Right America: Feeling Wronged," got a scathing review in the Washington Post Monday:
Within the first few minutes of Alexandra Pelosi's "Right America: Feeling Wronged -- Some Voices From the Campaign Trail," an HBO documentary debuting tonight that purports to provide "a forum" for conservative supporters of John McCain and Sarah Palin "who saw their hopes and dreams evaporate in the wake of the Democratic victory" -- well, we know what kind of magnifying glass we're getting.
It's drive-by journalism, to put it charitably, a string of stupefyingly brief hit-and-run interviews with a bunch of unidentified people who we know are going to say nothing that will surprise us. By then, we've already figured out they're going to be fried by Pelosi's camera. We know they're going to sound like yahoos, often goaded, always reduced to sound bites and caricatures.
[Pelosi] looks to be in over her head here with a documentary that professes to explain why die-hard conservatives feel so aggrieved. Note: Just to turn on the camera and record the juvenility and venom at a campaign rally isn't nearly enough to capture the whys of that behavior. Except for some celebrities, we never see most of her subjects for more than a few seconds. We never enter their homes, never view what they do for a living. We never get to know their families or acquire virtually any information about their backgrounds. We don't know if anybody has been scarred by a traumatic event or recently lost a job. My gosh, with one exception, we never learn their names ... This is less a documentary than a reason for a snarky laugh track.
In an interview with Salon, Pelosi defended her work in anticipation of criticism. Of some of the more out-there comments on Barack Obama (specifically, calling him the Antichrist), she says, "It was much more common than you'd think ... And I think that a lot of them were mimicking things they heard on right-wing radio." She added:
"I know that I'm going to be criticized for picking people who say some extreme things. If you take the guy that says Obama is the Antichrist and use him as a sample of the movie, you have to take one of the 20 other people who say very reasonable things. You have to take the woman who says we're angry because -- 'The economy. I went home and cried last night because I just lost my 401K.' There are lots of normal people in this movie. I sat in the edit room for a very long time. I was very fair in terms of the ratio of how many people I interviewed that said Obama is the Antichrist -- put that in once. 'He reminds me of Hitler' -- put that in once. I heard that every day at every rally. That doesn't mean that everybody who showed up at that rally felt that way, but just people on the camera. Remember, who's going to talk to a camera? These are going to be certain kinds of people. ... I think it's really irresponsible to focus on the few crazies that appear in the movie as opposed to the tons of really sane, normal people that appear in the movie.
Pelosi gave a similar argument on CNN's "American Morning." Watch:
"Right America: Feeling Wronged" debuts on HBO Monday night.