Tumultuous times at Oakland High
“Homeroom” is the third in a trilogy of documentary films by Peter Nicks about Oakland. The first two — “The Waiting Room,” set in an Oakland hospital waiting room, and “The Force,” about the Oakland Police Department — were masterpieces of the form. The new film, “Homeroom,” centered on students at Oakland High School, is something of a disappointment.
It’s well-made and informed by Nicks’ artistic sensibility, but its focus is narrow. The other films were about entire organizations and about the phenomena of being caught inside them. “Homeroom,” by contrast, is only barely about high school, concentrating instead on the efforts of several Oakland students to abolish the school district’s own police force.
This isn’t to say that that angle shouldn’t have been covered, but it might have been covered as a subset of a larger story about the particulars of the Oakland High School experience. Something else, too: When we meet the class of 2020, coming back to school in the fall of 2019, we know something big is going to happen to them, something that they and the filmmaker don’t know at the outset.
The pandemic will soon displace all their plans.
Bad luck though that is, it seems like amazing luck for the filmmaker, the kind of luck that great documentarians tend to have. But it turns out that Nicks isn’t all that interested in the pandemic. Instead, the national event he emphasizes is the outrage following the murder of George Floyd. This is justifiable in all sorts of ways. That event galvanized the students and bolstered their efforts. Plus, a street protest is better cinema than footage of people on Zoom.
But in the end, the Floyd protests only dimly illuminate the stories of these Oakland teenagers, and the stories of these students don’t provide a rewarding prism through which to understand national events. “Homeroom” is still interesting enough to watch, but in the way that a news item is interesting. “Homeroom” lacks the personal, the small story made big, the specific made universal.
Still, there’s worthwhile stuff here. First of all, it’s just interesting to watch 17-year-olds. They have been taking selfies since they could lift their arms, and so they are the generation most comfortable with being on camera. We see them taking picture after picture of themselves, until it begins to seem grotesque, but the mission of every generation is to confound and appall their elders, and this seems a fairly benign way to do that.
It’s also worth listening to how they talk, and to realize how much they’re influenced by the cliches of popular culture. A few years ago, I came upon an old journal from when I was 16 and was astonished to realize that — despite what I assumed to be my own pristine originality — my entire worldview had basically been formed by watching the sitcoms “Love American Style” and “Room 222.” Here the cliches derive from elsewhere, but you can hear them in the students’ public and private conversations and in their poetry.
In the end, “Homeroom” lacks impact, taken as a whole, but anyone who sees it will derive something from the experience.