By Doug Strassler

We first meet Augustine - a kitchen servant, the title character of director-writer Alice Winocour’s impressive debut feature – in the middle of a major fit while working a very highbrow dinner. It’s a convulsion so severe I expected her character to die. But Augustine (played by French singer Soko) survives, albeit with one shut eye and a paralyzed half of her body, submitted to the inspection of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon) at Paris’ Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital. Augustine isn’t completely the story of its suffering heroine once Charcot enters the picture, and while both prove fascinating characters, this very promising film left me wishing that Augustine had provided a bit more character study for its leads.

Photo courtesy Music Box Films

Charcot, a real-life neurologist whose work directly influenced Sigmund Freud, quite quickly sees in Augustine a pawn to use in his quest to earn more research funding for Salpêtrière. He diagnoses Augustine with ovarian hysteria (a panacea diagnosis that will be familiar to those who saw Sarah Ruhl’s play In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play – or its more neutered film adaptation, Hysteria). Charcot uses hypnosis to induce public seizures in Augustine, questioning the line between experimentation and punishment. Is he a puppeteer? For that matter, is she really as susceptible to him as the good doctor thinks she is?

Winocour asks her audience bear silent witness to Charcot’s treatment of Augustine, which eventually evolves into a transactional relationship in which he rewards her participation with a private room and dresses. Being a patient of his affords Augustine a better life than she has ever known as a member of the working class, and she knows he needs her as much as she desires a cure for her malady. While medical treatments could often be brutal, as Winocour painstakingly makes clear, Augustine’s worst fear is for another patient to catch Charcot’s attention.

But there is also an underlying attraction between the two which feeds the power play. In one sequence, Charcot insists that Augustine stroke his pet monkey, leading to a rhythm in which this odd couple ends up rubbing against each other (Charcot, for the matter, is married to a Constance, very subtly played by Chiara Mastroianni, an upper-class woman who uses her status to help propel Charcot’s career.) Later on, while spoon-feeding soup to Augustine, it becomes apparent that she now wields more influence in their relationship. Both Lindon and Soko offer skilled portrayals of two in an ever-changing relationship without ever judging their characters’ deeds (or mis-deeds).

In spite of all this, I wish Augustine were a little more…something. I wish it cut deeper or ran darker, exploring more of the impulses experienced by doctors treating patients with psychosexual disorders. Augustine is quite feminist in tone and has all the merit of an Edith Wharton novel, but lacks the requisite commentary on class – Augustine may be taking advantage of her situation, but Charcot will always be in a position with more options than his patient. I also wish the film’s climax, inevitable and earned, was actually just the springboard to something greater and more revelatory. Still, these are benign wishes. Augustine remains worthy of observation.

It’s always nice to see a work of art that values the art of creation – particularly the act of observant writing. Such is the case with In the House, the latest satire-cum-thriller from French auteur François Ozon. Adapting Juan Mayorga’s play, House is a clever and engaging window into the double-edged sword that is potential, as it focuses on both sides: those who have yet to make good on it, and those who never really did.

Photo courtesy Cohen Media Group

Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is a bitter high school literature teacher married to his art-dealer wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). (In a highfalutin’ reference, the school is named “Lycee Gustave Flaubert,” named for the author of Madame Bovary, one of the more perfect works of literature in any language.) Germain has nothing but contempt for his pupils, but one lower class student, Claude (a curiously mercurial Ernst Umhauer), takes advantage of Germain’s mundane writing exercises (“How I spent my weekend”) as a vicious attempt at voyeurism, describing the middle-class family of a peer in details both cunning and cutting.

Claude’s innate talent unearths a seemingly buried spark in Germain, who takes Claude in as a means of improving (exploiting?) the young man’s gifts. He encourages Claude to pursue his writing and further infiltrate Rapha’s (Bastien Ughetto) family, fanning the flames of Claude’s obsession with Rapha’s mother, Esther (Emaneulle Seigner), and also echoing last decade’s Swimming Pool. And Germain abets Claude’s pursuit even further, crossing lines he knows better than to cross. Ozon teases us, having Germain refer to those observed by Claude as “fictional characters,” thus establishing a meta tone for the film that cuts down on its ultimate danger and opens the door for amusement and ridicule, even if it posed at a target as easy as the French class system.

House is part social commentary, part unabashed soap opera, and the fun comes in Ozon’s ability to push both subgenres to the fullest while simultaneously entwining the tenets therein. The film is an indictment of our modern-day obsession with tabloid culture, but not a condescending one – Ozon’s technical crew (including cinematographer Jérôme Alméras and editor Laure Gardette) loop us in on the action rather than ever distance us from it. We’re all guilty members of the party; we’re the Kit Kat Klub audience at the end of Cabaret rather than the shut-out Kay Corleone at the culmination of the first Godfather.

Ozon, whether knowingly or not, also invokes other recent films ranging from Adaptation to Atonement in its look at the writer as master, God-like manipulator. Both Germain, and especially Claude, learn how to pull strings in their storytelling as a way of appealing to their audience. And Ozon also deliberately evokes other movies, especially Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers from the 1950s, aided by a pitch-perfect performance from Luchini and a tongue-in-cheek one from Scott Thomas. who support Ozon’s premise, Umhauer, too, is perfect as the poker-faced youngster pulling the strings. Of course, it’s inevitable that the director eventually adopts all the characteristics of his storytelling leads (and somewhat cripples House with an off-course ending). Do these characters sometimes feel like puppets, engineered to follow a path of Ozon’s own design? Sure they do. But their puppet master is just having some fun here. Let him.

In the House is playing at Landmark Sunshine Cinema and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

In God is the Bigger Elvis, about former movie actress Dolores Hart who gave up her Hollywood career opposite such glamorous stars as Elvis Presley, Montgomery Clift, Stephen Boyd and is now Mother Prioress at the Regina Laudis Benedictine abbey in Bethleham, Conn., director Rebecca Cammisa touches upon faith, devotion and love. The essence of Hart’s biography­­—her struggle to find peace and meaning—is clear enough to make the half-hour documentary powerfully moving. It was just the affirmation I needed to see after the insufferable Beyond the Hills.
For Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, politics is the bigger Elvis. He sets Beyond the Hills at a remote convent where an Orthodox priest and nuns subject a violent but inarticulate girl to an exorcism. Beyond the Hills ignores the possibility of spiritual life to make a drama about the repression of female rights. It’s the same propagandistic game as in Mungiu’s wildly over-celebrated abortion film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. This time his two new heroines, mousey Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) and butch Alina (Cristina Flutur), are once again victims of patriarchy—here represented by the cruel Orthodox church. Sexual politics and obvious, mundane sense of melodrama are the only dogma Mungiu believes in.

Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills

It takes Mungiu two and a half hours to lay out his anti-religious harangue using banal dailiness, mistaking a plodding narrative for “realism.” Beyond the Hills is based on “the non-fiction novels” of Tatiana Niculescu who claims to have documented an instance of religious torture and Mungiu, a former journalist, displays the typical liberal hack’s credulousness. (The girls are lesbians subjected to an extreme form of aversion therapy.) But biased gullibility isn’t artistry. Voichita and Alina may be the screen’s most infuriating bimbos since 4,3,2. It takes about four months, three weeks and two days of being tied down, scrubbed raw and prayed over before Alina finally says “Leave me alone!” Voichita stands by helpless.
Mungiu neglects to give the girls minds. Voichita’s witlessness is the exact opposite of Dolores Hart’s searching or the various stories of nuns renouncing worldliness in God is the Bigger Elvis. (One even comments on their “spousal commitment with Jesus” and the “physical union” experienced in singing devotionals—an enlightening paradox to their vows of celibacy.) Yet, Mungiu’s sneaky, inarticulate lovers canoodle and massage with little personal loyalty.
To tell from advance reviews and Cannes Film Festival prizes, liberals like such cipher heroines (as in Zero Dark Thirty) because they don’t examine their own prejudices. Voichita and Alina recall Of Mice and Men‘s cynic and retard George and Lenny living in a Kafkaesque world that justifies liberal paranoia. In Mungiu’s only honest work, Tales of the Golden Age, his omnibus of short stories depicted Ceaucescu-era Romania as a heartless, vicious society of mutually abusive citizens; it was pretty convincing. Now he’s back to polarizing. Though set in Romania, Beyond the Hills actually takes place in the post-moral universe (the title refers to what our mainstream media calls fly-over country).

Dolores Hart in God is the Bigger Elvis

Mungiu’s slack narrative only sharpens when the priests, Mother Superior and nuns are upbraided by a disrespectful doctor (science vs. belief) and then are herded into a wagon by a threatening, condemnatory police captain and subjected to a repetitious inquest. An imaginative, challenging filmmaker would have accepted Voitcha’s religious conversion as in God is the Bigger Elvis or Bruno Dumont’s Hadwjch, testing our faith and politics. Mungiu’s tactics depend on shakey cam, screaming hysterics and support by a nihilistic film culture. That’s what turns propaganda into a cause celebre.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The Silence, an impeccably acted but ultimately un-engaging mystery.

Silence, adapted by Baran bo Odar from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel and denoting Odar’s feature directorial debut, is a then-and-now flick. We first see two men track down an eleven-year-old girl in a field; one murders her while the other looks on. Nearly a quarter-century later, another young girl vanishes in what appears to be a copycat crime, stringing together the lives of grieving family members, detectives, and killers alike, all of whom are broken in their own, not unfamiliar ways.

If Silence so far sounds fairly by-the-numbers, that’s because it is, in every sense of the genre, procedural. Odar’s script hits all the expected notes in dealing with the aftermath of a grisly crime, but the net result is less than symphonic. Loss and estrangement permeate pretty much the lives of everyone attached to this case, whose resolution seems pre-ordained thanks to the film’s overt preamble. David (Sebastian Blomberg) is the detective who becomes obsessed with solving the current case as a means of distracting himself from his own recent widowhood. Burghart Klaussner’s Krischan, meanwhile, cannot let go of the earlier, unsolved crime despite his retirement. “It was a real pain in the ass,” glibs Elena (Katrin Sass) about the loss of her daughter 23 years ago, a wound that Sass shows us still bleeds internally even as Elena maintains a stiff upper lip. Even the two murderers we first meet, Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) and Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring), remain affected by their crime as they go about their lives.

Silence is smart until it isn’t. The notion of the past constantly nipping at the heels of the present is not a revelation. And the idea of suffering and proximity to danger fails to cast a suspenseful shadow over his film, even as an innocent young child injures himself on a trampoline. (We get it: harm lurks around the corner for everyone. Let’s not get too carried away.) And it is eventually a mistake to focus on the inner lives of the film’s tangled web of characters instead of making the central mysteries more engrossing. Still, Odar wrestles wonderful performances from his ensemble. Blomberg, Möhring, and particularly Sass are all quite credible in rendering people whose lives have become untethered, showing what it is to be lost in plain sight.

Sympathy comes for all, but empathy has a more difficult time entering the room. Odar’s portrayal of quiet mourning is eventually too, well, silent for its own good. All of these characters behave in ways that are psychologically justified, but they suffer from a lack of exploration. And most are stoic, so while Odar steers clear of melodrama, there’s also a lack of any kind of dramatic potency to shepherd his story along. And since we know early on whom the perpetrators of at least one crime are, there is little suspense (the thorough explanation by one character of another’s motive provides an unnecessary denouement as well).  One roots for the film and its talented players onscreen and behind it, but Silence is a murder mystery that is all too clinical. Like the events of the film itself, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

The Silence is currently playing at Cinema Village.

AN EXCLUSIVE CITYARTS CRITICS DISCUSSION OF WALTER HILL’S COMEBACK

Bullet to the Head is an event. It is director Walter Hill’s first theatrical film since 2002’s Undisputed and the most meaningful Sylvester Stallone acting vehicle since Rocky. On this occasion, I discuss the significance of Bullet to the Head with CityArts film critic Gregory Solman, author of the definitive essay on Hill’s oeuvre, as a good movie, an essay on masculinity and an advance in contemporary cinema aesthetics.

AW: Stallone’s performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson’s streetfighter in Hill’s directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill’s buddy movie 48 Hrs. Hill and Stallone’s cinema histories are combined, and the action genre is updated.

GS: It’s the ideal comparison, I agree, because Hill makes the essential emotional connections to character lesser directors ignore—directors, I might add, who are all worse at directing action than Hill, yet are no better than him with actors. I like reminding people that when Bronson’s performance stunned everyone in Hard Times, it was Bronson’s 60th movie—and Hill’s first. I won’t forget Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing, either. Stallone’s saturnine mood and weathered face are alone more interesting than his revivals of Rocky and Rambo combined, because Hill understands the power of genre and, more than anyone else in contemporary filmmaking, takes to heart F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crystalline bromide: “Action is character.” Have new filmmakers learned from Hill in Exile, or from Neveldine/Taylor, for that matter?

AW: Hill in Exile is an interesting way to describe the past decade of inept action movies. From David Fincher to Steve Soderbergh and the Bourne movies, most filmmakers don’t know how to film action with meaning or action heroes with ethics. Hill has been sorely missed. Remember the pop culture fun of Streets of Fire, which updated pop nostalgia and genre refinement?

GS: It was cinematic celebration from start to finish, and gets at Hill’s great advance in comic-book form. The sledgehammer fight anticipates the fire-axe battle between Bobo and mercenary Keegan (Jason Momoa), but beneath that lies the inevitability of one-on-one confrontation between, in this story, the two breeds of ex-military mercenary: Bobo and Keegan, who has an embittered idealism defined by codes of manhood.

AW: This movie has the best dialogue in years. Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.

GS: He brought back his signature single-exchange scenes, too, which I love. I’m not a fan of Bobo’s final, or rather, penultimate riposte [“That’ll be the day”], though I like the recapitulation of Jack Cates, the cop in 48 Hrs., in Kwon’s challenge, and imagine Bobo to be a fan of John Wayne in general, Ethan Edwards in particular. To be clear, it’s not the line itself, or the association, but it strikes me as an over-articulation.

AW: I disagree. The Searchers is a famous cinema touchstone. I love that Hill rescued Wayne’s line from a pedestal.

The Walter Hill dialogue continues at www.CityArts.info

This week, America’s most overrated filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh, gets booted out of the arena by the country’s most underrated great filmmaker, Walter Hill.

The simultaneous release of Hill’s Bullet to the Head and Soderbergh’s Side Effects perfectly contrasts the art of genre filmmaking with the pretense of art filmmaking as genre. After a decade off, Hill returns to cinema with a Sylvester Stallone action movie that streamlines moral complexity and aesthetic mastery while Soderbergh pretends another exploration of topical issues while dully manipulating thriller clichés.

Side Effects’ story of medical malfeasance involves a pill-giving psychiatrist (Jude Law) and his waif-victim patient (Rooney Mara)—the girl with an insider-trading monkey on her back. Really, it’s much less interesting than a law-breaking hitman forced to regulate his conscience in relentless tests of his manhood. The former is schlock, the latter is art—if you appreciate the depth and creativity of kinetic, poetic narrative. That legacy has always inspired Hill’s artistry.

Soderbergh’s Traffic, Erin Brokovich and Magic Mike reigned over an era of cynical banality, while Hill’s sharp, inventive technique seen in The Warriors, Geronimo and Undisputed went unappreciated (and underground in TV projects like Deadwood and Broken Trail). Bullet to the Head is an exhilarating revival of efficient, expressive storytelling while Side Effects combines Psycho trick-casting and deceptive plot devices to disguise indifference to its characters’ moral crises.

Soderbergh is callous about “the culture,” offering an insincere money and class critique as shallow as his underlit videography. Hill’s critique is inherent in the efficacy and splendor of his action and montage. Fanboys raised on CGI won’t notice the difference, but true movie lovers will thrill to it (and to dialogue like “You had me at ‘Fuck you’”—beat that, Tarantino).

Soderbergh replaces the topical, medical subject of Nick Ray’s Bigger Than Life with nihilistic cynicism while Hill explores post-9/11 ideas of conflicted morality: Stallone gives a new iconic performance as a man at odds with the law, and Hill distills his story in the most exuberant American kinetics of the past few years.

If Side Effects is Soderbergh’s last film (as promised), give him an urgent farewell. Bullet to the Head’s excitement inspires a “welcome back” for Hill.

By Gregory Solman

In Fracknation, Irish investigative journalist Phelim McAleer finds a combustible metaphor for the contrived controversy of hydraulic fracturing in the footage of the Sautner family hustlers of Pennsylvania.

McAleer couldn’t politely interview the couple without Craig threatening a lawsuit (apparently emboldened by the radical National Resources Defense Council), and Julie threatening to pull a pistol on McAleer on a public road, where she voluntarily stopped to shout at him. (It’s rich to watch her sheepishly press a gun permit against the inside of her car window, demonstrating the Defense Technique When Not Being in the Least Threatened.) So McAleer pulls a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a taping of the Sautners, apoplectic upon hearing the Environmental Protection Agency—such a right-wing frat under Lisa Jackson—confirm the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s finding that their water tests safe and clean.

McAleer notes the irony that not having contaminated water would be considered good news to all but those looking for an Erin Brockovich ending to their woes, real or imagined, or in ideological lockstep with what is now a full-fledged anti-fracking movement, replete with its own agitprop such as Josh Fox’s polemic GasLand and Gus Van Sant’s desperately “relevant” fiction, Promised Land. For the greenshirts, only bad news is good news: Recall that the same eco-special interests were all for using natural gas when it was an empty-handed gesture, when they thought we were almost out. (Their next suggestion: Francium power—but only if actually bottled in France, in IWW-run shops.)

In Fracknation, McAleer is mostly after the would-be Michael Moore, Fox, in whose disputatious documentary the Sautners display their dubiously adulterated water and others light their taps—and a large part of the impressionable public—on fire. But that’s a well-known, ancient phenomenon having nothing to do with fracking, and everything to do with methane naturally seeping wherever it can, as surely a few of Fox’s newfound celebrity friends must know from living near the La Brea Tar Pits, where the streets spontaneously combust from time to time. (Clearly, if the greenshirt “gascists” could redevelop Los Angeles, there’d be nothing within miles of mid-Wilshire—well, except maybe environmentally sensitive Ed Begley-esque manses—an area that would be turned into a no-man’s-land preserve to hasten the return of the kangaroo rat.)

When McAleer catches up to Fox—he, too, in the Moore mode—and accuses him of recklessly associating fire-water with fracking (which has never once been proven to have contaminated groundwater, occurring thousands of feet beneath the water table), Fox says, “Yes, but it’s not relevant.” And from his perspective—which smacks of Hillary Clinton’s on Benghazi—it isn’t. Despite Fox’s pose as a friendly naïve explorer in GasLand, reinforced by a lazy narrative drawl suggesting Bill Murray’s muttering groundskeeper in Caddyshack, his project aims to stop shale gas production, by any means necessary.

The moratorium on leasing that GasLand inspired animates McAleer to work the other side of the documentary-cliché fence, matching Fox’s often sincere-sounding fracking alarmists with a Depression-era revival of plaintive, tearful farmers fearful of losing their land because their gas leases have been shut off amid already hard times. Besides them, McAleer finds plenty of residents in Dimock, Pa., who don’t appreciate GasLand’s suggestion that their homesteads are toxic wastelands, inhabited by greedy despoilers and easy marks for Matt Damon.

McAleer systematically eviscerates GasLand’s false implications and sloppy inferences (finally, not even distinguishing between oil and gas production, and instantly trotting out a Halliburton/Cheney conspiracy, the not-so-secret handshake of Club 9/11 Truth). McAleer interviews specialists who assure us that the mathematical detection of seismic activity does not constitute an earthquake (and that the greenshirts’ beloved geothermal energy is worse). He unveils collusion between biased government officials, liberal media, non-governmental organizations and their Hollywood waterboys. He embarrasses Fox, a Columbia University grad, for his woeful ignorance of physics, engineering and chemistry.

Fracknation then travels to Europe to suggest that new-school communism under Vlad Putin has a hidden hand behind the anti-fracking agenda, so that Russia can continue to use a gas monopoly in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a political cudgel, turning it on or off as it pleases, and charging little old ladies in Poland half their pensions for gas and electricity, bringing to mind Dr. Zhivago’s arrests for foraging firewood. (He might have contrasted their plight with the thousands of Californians driving natural-gas Honda Civics—the cleanest cars on the planet, including electrics—for an unsubsidized $1.36 a gallon, thanks to fracking, what reasonable people call a win-win.)
Fracknation’s timing is good, though it’s unlikely to crack already ossified myths or affect fracking’s prospects, when even the use of that vulgar-sounding nickname is as devious as cubic zirconia ads referring to the genuine article as “mined diamonds.” Fracking friends and foes—and the movies they love—have formed skirmish lines almost identical to those of the climate-change controversy.

So we’re going nowhere from here. But it’s heartening to see someone take on a few of the anecdotal, unscientific and politically motivated accusations against the practice, before they, too, become immune to counter evidence.

The frack list (neuropathy, fish kills, cancer, dead bunny rabbits, migraines, animal hair loss, neighborhoods erupting in flames) is already reminiscent of the hysterical global-warming compilations which currently run from “acne” to “yellow fever”—until “aardvark population decline” and “yam rust” are added by someone, anyone, somewhere. The same camps have enlisted the same recruits, including anti-capitalists out to control the economy by fiat, communist style; enrich themselves, like Qatar’s over-compensated useful idiot, Al Gore; or just feel morally superior to others and, in the sweetly juvenile manner of the Mars Attacks! teen hero, suggest, to a mariachi version of the national anthem, that “maybe, instead of houses, we could live in tepees, ’cause it’s better, in a lot of ways.”

VAN SANT AND DAMON’S PROMISED PROPAGANDA

Gus Van Sant must really be out of imagination (or horniness) to make the drab, politically slanted Promised Land. That’s two phony films in a row for Gus, following the 2010 Restless. Promised Land takes on the fracking controversy about drilling for gas in underground shale deposits, using Gus’ Good Will Hunting star Matt Damon as a gas company stooge trying to trick Pennsylvania farmers into leasing their land. As an exposé of the fashionable dilemma, the film is unconvincing politically and fraudulently sentimental about the average American’s skeptical response to technological progress.

When Damon, as corporate shill Steve Butler, tries hoodwinking rural folk (“‘Fuck you money’ is the ultimate liberator” he tells a landowner), his dishonesty recalls George Clooney’s self-pity in Up in the Air. Damon’s a shrewder actor, so he eschews Clooney’s false empathy and portrays a man who corrupts the American Dream while refusing to lose the American rat race. This frick-or-frack quandary turns Promised Land into a reverse-Capra movie in which the little people convert the bad protagonist—reviving his buried good instincts.

But Steve’s transformation is half-ass; his heart isn’t in the job anyway, only his contempt—the phony common-folk stance the Environmental Left prefers. In Promised Land, the anti-fracking controversy seems to be about class superiority as much as about the environment.

Van Sant, Damon and co-screenwriter, co-producer and co-star John Krasinski (portraying Dustin Noble, an antagonistic environmentalist) pretend that political position is more important than complicated truth. Using pretzeled logic, these filmmakers twist their story into unbelievable shapes to make the self-righteous point that Americans’ greed outweighs their truest values. Easy for millionaire filmmakers to say.

The love triangle between Steve, Dustin and local schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie Dewitt) lacks the gay sexual tension typical of Van Sant; this is just a propagandistic gimmick relying on the sentimentality of white-picket-fence heterosexual normalcy. (You can hear sheep bleating behind Steve’s confidence game, and an American flag is used as backdrop.) Van Sant, Damon and Krasinski present what amounts to anti-fracking propaganda without deciding which side they are on. It’s as if the industrial revolution—and unbiased cinema—never happened.

Celebrated indie film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ confuses pandering with empathy

Documentary ‘Fracknation’ debates ‘Gasland,’ ‘Promised Land’ and the greenshirts—and wins.

By Gregory Solman