Tackling the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the Southern border, Errol Morris’s newest documentary “Separated” is an incisive overview of the rise of Trumpism, the fear-mongering that went along his rise to power, and his administration’s attempts to vilify undocumented immigrants. It’s as angry as anything Morris has made in the past — including “Standard Operating Procedure,” a film that shares a schematic and thematic kinship here — but it’s also one that feels incomplete. Instead, it’s the work of a celebrated and prolific filmmaker who, somehow, has neglected the human element of the story he’s telling.
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This is all the more strange considering that Morris is perhaps the predominant documentarian of the tension between people and institutions. His best work, “The Fog of War,” especially, often considers individuals at the precipice of historical moments. His Robert McNamara documentary works not because of McNamara’s Zelig-like ability to be present during every historical moment in the mid-twentieth century. Instead, Morris is able to burrow into the psyche of a figure whose self-importance tensions against his role as a public servant. This push-pull is obvious in his late-stage work, including “The Unknown Known,” “Tabloid,” “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and especially “American Dharma.” The latter film — about Steve Bannon, one-time chief strategist for the Trump Administration — feels especially important here.
But, unlike “Dharma,” which still tried to humanize Bannon, even as it blasted his rhetoric and beliefs, “Separated” makes Morris’s viewpoint quite clear. Here, adapting NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” Morris is clearly and rightfully angry at the treatment of undocumented immigrants. As one interviewee plainly states, the policy of separating parents from children is tantamount to child abuse, laying this problem squarely on the Trump Administration, including Kirstjen Nielson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Scott Lloyd, the Head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, especially.
That the latter sits down for an interview with Morris here is fascinating. But, unlike Stephen Miller, Bannon, or Nielson, Lloyd comes across as a try-hard, willing to do anything to appease his bosses, including, it seems, separating out thousands of children. These types of people, Morris argues, are the ones who actually carry out the horrible acts, while Trump, Miller, and others pretend to know nothing about the children locked in cages across the Southern border.
For some, “Separated” will play out as a reminder, succinctly moving through Trump’s demonization of immigrants in his 2016 campaign into his administration’s flip-flopping on whether or not they will separate out families. John Kelly, in particular, comes across as looking like a ghoul while he was serving as the Secretary of Homeland Security, first telling Wolf Blitzer that he would separate families before backtracking before Congress. In a shock to perhaps no one, Morris and Soboroff lay out a succinct timeline that the administration was separating families well before anyone else was aware.
We get a clear picture of the horrible conditions at these detainment facilities and a never-ending back-and-forth about the small bureaucratic decisions that led up to this policy. This includes a trove of spreadsheets and emails that lay bare the ways in which horrendous acts of inhumane treatment are couched in the language of corporate and legal jargon.
What we never really see how this actually affects the immigrants. Despite its title, “Separated” centralizes the bureaucrats, those both for and against the policy, and Soboroff. But never those who went through the process. Save for some woefully misguided reenactments about a fictionalized mother and son that punctuate the interviews; the undocumented immigrants are faceless and nameless. Morris has utilized this type of light fictionalization previously — to contentious ends, especially in “Standard Operating Procedure” — but here, the ethical considerations are subsumed by the fact that the reenactments are under-realized and, often, overly melodramatic. It’s a miscalculation that detracts from the rest of the film.
Further, Morris takes some pains to contextualize the Trump administration policy, both looking back to the Obama administration and ahead to Biden, but these rhetorical gestures often feel half-baked. This is a film zeroed in on one administration. That approach is acceptable, but it makes the film’s grasp for context feel hollow, especially when there is a pervasive argument that the Biden administration embraced many of Trump’s immigration policies, even while they lambasted them during the campaign.
Morris is at the stage of his career where everything he makes is both polished and interesting. But, in recent years, he’s oscillated between sweeping institutional exposés and zoomed-in portraits of characters. If anything, “Separated” again demonstrates that he’s at his best with the latter, as the documentary’s interests stretch far beyond its grasp. [B-]
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