Ava DuVernay (“Selma”) seems to be building a solid career out of wildly-overrated civil-rights centric movies. But the same way “Selma” was a little too artificial and naggingly self-conscious of how important it is, “13th” never lets you forget that it’s supposed to be important, even as it’s actually kind-of a step backwards in how we talk about prison reform.
To be fair, activist documentaries are always tough to get right. For every one that gets you to honestly see something in a different way (lawsuits in “Hot Coffee,” or nuclear power in “Pandora’s Promise”) you have ten that wind up preaching to the converted. “13th” falls decidely into the latter camp. Is there a liberal in America that doesn’t know our justice system is racist? That doesn’t know the War on Drugs has disproportionately affected black men to the extent 1 in 3 will do jail time? That doesn’t know the impact of private prisons has led to the world’s largest prison population?
“13th” says these things as if it hasn’t been explained better and more in-depth in Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC talk show, John Oliver’s best episodes, or the superior documentary “The House I Live In” plus dozens of other sources from “Vice” episodes to Spike Lee docs to even (sometimes) CNN specials. The most significant change DuVernay makes is tying in the history of black America with the criminal justice system, but we literally did an entire podcast about that in February (Episode 7–“Is the War on Drugs Really a Race War?”). Now you might say “Well even if the information is repetitive, what’s the harm in shining one more light?”
Because the context the film was released in is oh so important. This was released on Netflix October 7th (where lots of millennial and minority voters could watch it), roughly a month before the election, and it seems to go out of its way to blame the Clintons for most of our criminal justice system problems. It spends twice as long on Bill Clinton’s failures as it does Nixon’s or Reagans’s and the movie’s few scenes mentioning Trump are featured in the trailers like the film wasn’t a de facto advertisement for him by saying Trump and Clinton are essentially the same on criminal justice issues. By being completely ignorant as to the nuances of our political and/or criminal justice system—one of DuVernay’s talking heads is Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow” who infamously didn’t know the difference between state prisons and federal prisons while stumping for Sanders and slamming Hillary on the campaign trial—you may have a lot of liberals basically feeling there is no difference in the two parties. Something like this may very well have affected a vote where African-American and millennial turn-out was much softer than anticipated. [Trump has now notoriously thanked black voters for staying at home.]
A documentary that may be accidentally hurting the very issue it pretends to care about in the name of Oscar hunting? Sounds like DuVernay’s specialty. And it’s worth noting that she didn’t go to a prison. She didn’t interview prison guards or inmates. She doesn’t mention the difference in state and federal prisons or really try to humanize the actual inmates all that much (we see more footage from 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” than we do life in a 2016 prison). Her idea of investigative journalism seems to be plopping a camera in-front of Van Jones (or Grover Norquist and other people more famous for being pundits than specific work on criminal justice reform) and letting him talk more or less the same as he does every night on CNN. That’s not particularly illuminating for an audience that—if even choosing to watch this—probably already knows everything the film will say.
That’s why the movie’s best section is in roughly the middle featuring an all-too-brief section explaining the various contractors and industries around private prisons, everything from telephone services to garment makers. The movie needed more of this—and to call out by name companies profiting from private prisons either exclusively or for the cheap labor—for it to really work.