No shield for chaos
Alex Gibney and his team deliver a damning indictment of Trump’s pandemic response in a new documentary, ‘ Totally Under Control’
BY JUSTIN CHANG FILM CRITIC >>> The last thing we see in “Totally Under Control” is a title card noting that President Trump has tested positive for the coronavirus. This will of course not come as news, let alone a spoiler, to anyone.
In the whiplash- inducing days since that diagnosis, the public and the media have struggled to keep up with every jaw- dropping new development — a stint at Walter Reed, an imbecilic joyride, a dramatic return- home video that should have been titled “Triumph of the Ill” — even as an extraordinary outbreak has surged through the White House and the upper echelons of Republican leadership.
And so it is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date.
How could it not? Even Alex Gibney, nonfiction cinema’s most prolific issue chaser, could hardly be expected to keep up with the dizzying downward spiral of a nation in the grip of an unshakable illness. And that illness, with apologies to Susan Sontag, is not the coronavirus so much as Trumpism itself.
With calm, excoriating precision, the movie argues that the administration’s calamitous non- response ensured that a formidable viral threat would become a debilitating one, marked by a devastating economic collapse and the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans and counting.
Playing this week at select drive- in venues before it hits video on demand Oct. 13 and Hulu on Oct. 20, “Totally Under Control” is both a slow- motion tragedy and a sickening rush; it compresses roughly nine months of steadily mounting tension and chaotic freefall into two hours. That’s a pretty concentrated dose of outrage, and maybe a redundant one for anyone who’s been following the news. But even with the occasional repeti
Not rated Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes Playing: Starts Friday at Vineland Drive- In, City of Industry; available Tuesday on VOD platforms and Oct. 20 on Hulu.