Crisis documentary leaves more questions than answers
Glasgow Film Festival Various venues, Glasgow
Receiving its world premiere at this year’s GFF, You’ve Been Trumped director Anthony Baxter’s latest documentary, Flint (✪✪✪), sees the filmmaker returning to the eponymous Michigan city to explore the public health crisis that left its already economically challenged citizens without useable water in their homes.
The source of the problem was the 2014 decision to switch the local water supply from the Great Lakes to the polluted Flint River, a costcutting exercise that started corroding the city’s lead piping and left the inhabitants of this majority black, majority working-class city with toxic water supplies and escalating health issues. Baxter used the story in his 2016 documentary You’ve Been Trumped Too as a stark warning about the consequences of electing public officials, in this case Michigan state governor Rick Snyder, to run politics like a business – a point Michael Moore, who is from Flint, subsequently reinforced in his own 2018 Trump documentary Fahrenheit 11/9.
Here, though, Baxter focuses on the appalling disregard for the wellbeing of the population by following several families and individuals as they negotiate the daily challenges of living without this most basic and fundamental of amenities.
The film is at its best when focused on their stories and the anger is palpable as these ordinary citizens are forced to fight for basic rights; it gets a little fuzzier as it broadens its scope to zero in on the scientists and celebrity-endorsed pseudo-scientists who swoop in with conflicting information about the ongoing toxicity of the water.
Although you can’t help but feel for the confused residents who don’t know who or what to believe, sometimes you just wish Baxter had the clout and journalistic tenacity to get proper access to those in power and hold them to account. In the end, the film peters out, leaving more questions than it answers.
Also receiving its world premier at GFF, the new baking-themed British rom-com Love Sarah (✪✪) proves the muchin-decline genre still has a way to go if it’s ever to regain the cultural prominence it once had.
Kicking off with the sudden death of the titular Sarah, the film revolves around the efforts of her best friend Isabelle (Shelly Conn) to fulfil their shared dream of opening a bakery together and so enlists the help of Sarah’s estranged mum Mimi (Celia Imrie), her mildly wayward daughter Clarissa (Sharon Tarbet) and her ex-boyfriend and fellow hotshot baker Mathew (Rupert Penry-jones). The undercooked script is predictable in the extreme, full of banal plot revelations, cringeworthy misunderstandings and unbelievable characters.
Although not a rom-com, similar problems are present in Dirt Music (✪✪), an adaptation of Australian writer Tim Winton’s Man Booker-nominated 2002 novel of the same name.
Starring Kelly Macdonald as a romantically dissatisfied woman who embarks on an affair with a grief-stricken drifter (Garrett Hedlund), the film squanders its fine cast with a messy script that struggles to convey the interior lives of the characters or weave together their various backstories in dramatically satisfying ways.