Monday, January 19, 2009

Yup, Ricki Lake made something more respectable than Ben Stein did.

I saw two documentaries on consecutive nights last week--Expelled and The Business of Being Born. Expelled is Ben Stein's pet project and could have been subtitled, "What's So Wrong With Intelligent Design?" The Business of Being Born is Ricki Lake's pet project and could have been subtitled, "What's So Wrong With Home Birth?"

I could write a post or two (or ten) about each of these movies*, but I'll focus on one thing that I think distinguishes the latter film as a much better one: Authenticity.

*Five-second reviews: Expelled is pretty meh, though you'd probably like it if you're part of the choir it's preaching to; Business isn't perfect, either, but it's much more compelling, as long as you're OK with seeing a few no-holds-barred live births. If that assessment is all you cared about, you can quit reading now. (As if you needed me to tell you that.)

During our discussion of Expelled at church, Matt noted that movies like these are really not documentaries at all--they're feature-film-length essays. He's right: whereas a documentary is ostensibly someone just turning on a camera and filming reality by depicting a story or illuminating some aspect of culture (Hoop Dreams and Spellbound are great modern examples of what I'd consider true documentaries), these films are meant to make a point. That doesn't mean documenting reality; it means documenting reality as far as it fits the point you're trying to make.

There's nothing wrong with making a movie like this, but Expelled runs into trouble when it spends most of its time pretending that it's just an honest, old-fashioned documentary. Stein frames the film as his globe-trotting quest to determine whether Intelligent Design is as horrible as the evolutionists say. All the transitions went something like this: "I couldn't believe it--could the ID scientists' stories of being booted out by the science establishment really be true? I decided to go Seattle to find out." Do you honestly think we're that stupid, Ben? Of course you think one side is right and the other is just pompous and arrogant--that's why you're making this movie in the first place. Don't try to play it off like this movie is an honest depiction of your search for truth that just so happened to lead to Intelligent Design. It just leads the viewer to wonder, 'What else is being misleading about?'

Lake's approach with Business was the complete opposite of Stein's. Her film is a video essay, too--but it's pretty upfront in acknowledging that that's exactly what it is. She has all the talking heads explain why hospital births are often manipulative and not as safe as they're made out to be, and why home births are a completely safe and reasonable alternative. But then she does something that's almost jarringly honest: She follows five couples through their home-birth process (including her own and her director's).

She doesn't just edit to only show the relative calm between contractions and then cut to the post-birth euphoria. She shows it all: Women in pain; women grunting, groaning and pushing; husbands and midwives trying to talk them through the experience. (Then she shows the euphoria, too.) When an urgent problem develops during the director's own home birth, the scene doesn't get cut. Instead, she's shown hurriedly gathering her things, collapsing in pain in her apartment building's lobby, piling into a taxi and being rushed into the hospital for a C-section. It's not pretty, but it's what happened. And even though it's not the ideal home-birth experience, it makes for a more compelling argument: She lays her cards on the table, tells you what side she's on, then makes it very clear that she hasn't stacked the deck. Despite the chaos on screen, it's quite a reassuring effect. Strange as it feels to say, Ben could learn a thing or two from Ricki.

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