Late into Monrovia, Indiana, the local chapter of the Freemasons recognizes a man named Bauer for fifty years of service, the reward for which is the Grand Lodge Award of Gold. The pride on the man’s face strips at least twenty years of age off his face. As the qualifications get read, every man present seems to swell. Minute after minute in this meeting room the impact of this award settles over the audience.
Another director would have cut this scene by half if not three-quarters. Those directors aren’t Frederick Wiseman. The master documentarian’s latest project, his third long one in three years, explores the lives of residents of a a rural corner in south center Indiana. For a majority of the audience, these are the kinds of people familiar from six thousand New York Times and Washington Post stories since 2016: the Trump voters in so-called Red America. The president’s name goes unspoken, yet Wiseman exploits the audience’s secondhand knowledge of small towns to create, beneath the Zen serenity of his long takes, a quiet tension. When will the racists snap? But Wiseman isn’t Barbara Kopple, and Monrovia, Indiana isn’t Harlan County, USA. It also isn’t one of Wiseman’s very best, which last year’s Ex Libris and 2015’s In Jackson Heights were. Implicitly sentimental but serene about it, Monrovia, Indiana commemorates the stubbornness with which residents endure encroachments.
One of those encroachments is what we could call the Chamber of Commerce Approach, which also serves as the film’s leitmotif: without new investments, towns die. So says a consultant hired by the town council to explore ideas for expanding Monrovia’s tax base. Yet the white eight-person group looks at best ambivalent; they like the quietness (besides, the median income is about $65,000 a year, thanks to the strength of its agricultural industry). Wiseman returns to these council meetings, examining member reactions as one does a complex painting. A new housing development called, imaginatively, Homestead looks like a sham to one resident, who complains about a dead fire hydrant. At another meeting a resident complains about the crime the development has stirred — the crime in a town whose population is 1,063.
With the exception of a T-shirt glimpsed at a state fair with the slogan “Work harder millions on welfare are depending on you,” Monrovia, Indiana eschews national politics. A purchase at a gun show is treated no differently than a vet giving a dog a teeth cleaning (maybe there’s a subtle comment there). No doubt they’re there, but Wiseman, in an estimable career with classics like High School, Hospital, and National Gallery on his resume, understands that watching people behave in their natural habitat without interviews will tease out their virtues and cupidities. The elderly gather in a cafe and swap stories about dead and ill friends; a montage much later of gastronomical horrors in fry baskets lowered into hot grease is the closest thing to a didactic moment.
Worrying about saturated fat is not on the list of priorities of most Monrovians. But there’s a sense in which the town is an ante-room where residents wait for outcomes that life and practice have taught them not to overstate. Perhaps the eighty-eight-year-old Wiseman has reached this sort of cruising altitude himself.
GRADE: A-
Humanizing The Vacuum 