Domestic Violence; Birthday Girl
No American documentarian?no major, for that matter? demands as much of his audience as Frederick Wiseman. He asks that we think of life not as a series of self-contained moments driven by individual personalities (the American fantasy of life as it should be) but in terms of systems, institutions, exercises in power (life as it actually is). The one- and two-word titles of Wiseman's movies tell you a lot: Hospital, High School, Basic Training, Public Housing and now Domestic Violence, which plays through next week at Film Forum.
Domestic Violence unfolds in and near the Spring, a shelter for abuse victims somewhere near Tampa that serves several hundred women a year, about 1000 children and perhaps a dozen men battered by wives or male lovers. The average shelter mom is 26 with two to three children. A counselor says having to leave home and go to a shelter is "like being hit by a tornado." They bring their belongings in boxes, garbage bags and laundry baskets because they're usually in a hurry to get out.
Except for a brief sequence early on that shows a recently battered, bloody woman being carted away by paramedics while police look on, there is no onscreen depiction of violence or its immediate aftermath. Mostly we listen as women talk about abusive relationships and why they stayed in them for so long. Sometimes we hear from their kids or from the caseworkers and therapists trying to help them. But for the most part, the film belongs to the wives and girlfriends, with their bruises, cuts, casts and limps. As in most Wiseman films, the characters' lives seem to be ruled by a circular, self-defeating kind momentum?a convergence of past experience and present-day weakness that isn't fate, but seems like it. Many of the victims were physically or sexually abused as kids; so were many of the abusers; the children of abuse are quite likely to become victims or perpetrators themselves.
Wiseman illustrates this cycle in a series of quiet, plain, chilling conversations. A counselor asks a woman with a broken arm if she was ever beaten or molested as a child. The woman answers yes to both questions, and her uninflected tone suggests somebody just asked her if she wanted fries with that. In the scene where the woman gets taken away on the stretcher, the cops admit they've visited this particular house "six or eight times," and a neighbor asks them, "How much stuff do you have in this neighborhood and then cover it up?" In the shelter, a counselor chillingly informs a woman being stalked by her lover that sometimes the best defense is to disappear. A preschool girl who's seen Dad beat the hell out of Mom says that when her dad dies, she won't cry.
Wiseman prizes human behavior over public policy and "news hooks"; he wants to locate the general within the specific, the timeless within the immediate. So he favors long, long takes and natural sound, and he purges his settings of backstory, title cards, voiceover narration, photo inserts, music and nearly every other item in the documentary toolkit. (The style could be called Dogme 67.) Sometimes you don't even know the names of the people interacting onscreen; once the scene is done, it's likely you won't see the characters again. Wiseman makes a pact with institutions, camera subjects and the viewer that says, in effect, "I swear to observe without interfering, and to comment only through the arrangement of my material."
Those are impossible goals, but Wiseman seems to get closer to them than many documentarians. In his Voice review of Domestic Violence, J. Hoberman asked if Wiseman's "invisible" style was truly invisible or the ultimate contrivance. I think it's neither, and that the question, while academically interesting, is probably irrelevant. The mere act of witnessing any event alters it; beyond that, interference is a matter of degree, and of personal style. Documentary filmmaking is a visual variant of print reporting, and in print reporting the writer accepts the fact that his presence subtly alters the behavior of the people he covers (in ways he might never realize) and resolves to move on from there.
The main difference between traditional "objective" reportage and so-called "new journalism" is the degree to which the reporter announces his presence. Wiseman is old-school. He stands in the room, shuts his mouth and lets you look through his eyes. Sometimes his subjects acknowledge his presence (in 196 minutes of Domestic Violence, I counted eight stray glances into the camera), but most of the time they go on about their business. Some writers insist on describing Wiseman's style as "omniscient," but it's not. It's more like third-person limited. What you see and what you hear is what you get.
It's amazing how well this style works, provided you're willing to open yourself to it. Watch nearly any scene in a Wiseman film that depicts the powerless and the powerful interacting, or any scene where bureaucrats talk to each other or to the public: the man gets it right. Just as important, he gets it, period. He records events that may alter the course of individual lives, but which are frequently written off by lesser documentarians as "uncinematic." (There is often a clipboard involved.) He understands that daily life is made up of ritual exchanges and routine journeys; he dares to put them on film in a format that requires us to examine them closely. He's an archeologist of the banal, an oral historian who happens to work on celluloid. We watch Wiseman watching other people, and see ourselves.
It all sounds fashionably tawdry, I know, yet somehow it doesn't play that way. Director Jez Butterworth, who made the film with screenwriting brother Tom and producing brother Steve, keeps his widescreen camera back far enough to let us see the characters' hesitant, realistically awkward body language, and avoids music unless it's absolutely required. The light looks real, the clothes seem real; the film, while contrived, is rooted in behavioral reality. But there can only be so much reality in a film like this. Pretty soon we meet Nadia's two "cousins," the cute and weasely Yuri (Matheiu Kassovitz) and the brawny, impulsive, faintly brutish Alexei (Brotherhood of the Wolf costar Vincent Cassel, again), and you understand why the filmmakers made John a bank manager: suddenly the film becomes a well-acted, consistently charming, but ultimately forgettable retread of Something Wild, in which a middle-class nebbish's life is liberated and then destroyed by a fugitive female and the rest of her social class. (Kidman is feral and sweet, and her Russian is surprisingly convincing, but I couldn't stop admiring how hard she was working and how good she was; believability-wise, that's the kiss of death.) A variant of this Russian immigrant-British loner story was told in last year's Last Resort, a vastly superior romance with no stars and no budget. I've been telling people they should see it for more than a year now, and for some reason, nobody has ever taken me up on it.