According to the work of contemporary genius auteur Roland Emmerich, the person responsible for leading the 1969 Stonewall riots and founding the LGBTQ movement was a clean-cut white kid from middle America, who chucked bricks and led freedom chants that would change the course of the country’s relationship to gay rights forever. Also according to Emmerich per his execrable 2015 film “Stonewall,” transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson was a human being. That characterization is exactly as far as Emmerich felt she deserved, even though Johnson, not Jeremy Irvine’s hunky and thoroughly bogus hero, was a preeminent figure of the movement (and often credited, if erroneously, as the person who actually threw the brick that started the riots in the first place).
Two years later, enter David France, perhaps not quite an auteur, perhaps not an authority on LGBTQ rights, but certainly a better ally than Emmerich. His documentary, “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” does its subject justice where Emmerich’s biopic only dealt her insult, fully fleshing out her identity, her background, and her contributions to the advancement of gay and transgender equality. Granted, “Stonewall” is a comically low bar for gauging France’s work. If “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” was a C-grade product, it’d still be worthier of your limited time and fickle attention. France hasn’t gone above and beyond here. His work is competent. His foundation is sound. His heart and his head are in the right place.
He cares, in other words, and the film ends up demonstrating how far caring can take us, both as a work of art and as a work of art built around a singular, caring person. “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” is structured as a procedural, following crime victim advocate Victoria Cruz around New York City as she doggedly investigates Marsha’s violent and unsolved death in 1992. Had France felt the urge, he could have calibrated the film as a work of neo-realist fiction, with Cruz playing the part of truth-seeker in a city (and a culture) that refuses to assist or even acknowledge her. As compelling as a hard-boiled noirish postmortem on Johnson’s life and times and passing sounds, France follows the more appropriate course: he chronicles reality.
This is a smart move, because Johnson’s reality is staggering. It’s tragic, moving, and infuriating, a confluence of mixed emotions that’s intrinsically linked to the ongoing struggle not only for the recognition of LGBTQ rights in 2017, but for recognition of LGBTQ humanity. As Cruz carries on scrutinizing the facts of Johnson’s case — she went missing in June of 1992, her body was found in the Hudson almost a week later, and her death was ultimately ruled a suicide — a common thread emerges regarding the law’s views on transgender American rights: they don’t have any, or they do, but good luck getting anyone in a position of authority to even feign interest in the community. The history covered in “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” is couched partly in the 1960s, and partly in the 1990s; you can’t wrap your head around Marsha’s death without context for the latter.
Once you accept that trans deaths were as routine as they were disregarded in 1992, you start to see how a woman of Johnson’s esteem could end up bobbing down a river sporting a dent in her head without anyone in power batting an eye. That insight colors “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” as an account of a cultural era and a sobering reminder for those of us living now: times have changed, the bromide goes, but to say they’ve changed is to concede that they’ve outpaced attitudes. Speaking broadly and generously, 2017 is a better time to be trans in America than 1992; speaking more honestly, “better” is a very relative term. France appears bent on coaxing his audience to interrogate their preconceptions about much, and how meaningfully, prejudiced social stances have softened toward transgender Americans.
You may arrive at your own conclusions at the end of that interrogation, but “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” will haunt you no matter what you think or decide on; France’s use of archival footage brings Johnson to vivid life before us, along with fellow activist Sylvia Rivera, who we see being booed off the stage by the crowd gathered at a pride march in 1973. (If nothing else, the film is a reminder that transphobia knows no boundaries.) By invoking the spirits of the deceased and marrying them to the trauma of the living, France argues that suffering inflicted by bigotry is a cycle; the stories of Johnson and Rivera only differ from the story of Cruz in terms of mortality. Cruz, a transgender woman and veteran employee of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, was once the target of a brutal hate crime, too, and her memories are the fuel for her fire as she calls retired NYPD officers and interviews Johnson’s friends. “The Death and Life Marsha P. Johnson” is as much about Cruz fighting for Johnson as it is about Cruz fighting for herself.
The filmmaking is at times a tad on the side of choppy; France pivots from Cruz to past accounts of Johnson’s reputation, to interviews with Rivera, to talking head chats with several community advocates, and back to Cruz, giving the storytelling an occasional yo-yo effect. But the imbalance in pacing never dulls the narrative power of the documentary. At his best, France mimics Werner Herzog, with one sequence in particular, a private viewing of Johnson’s autopsy photos, echoing “Grizzly Man.” (Unlike Herzog, France doesn’t step in and pre-screen the images for Cruz. The anxiety in the room is palpable; her reaction to the pictures weakens the knees. It’s a harsh scene, but necessary.) He finds no definitive answer for us, either, though this isn’t a failing on his part. There may not even be a definitive answer, and if there is, it won’t be an easy answer. But that works in France’s favor. “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” isn’t an easy film. [B]