Domestic Violence looks like a Wiseman institution film, and in large measure it is, mainly set in a place called The Spring in Tampa, Florida, which serves victims of domestic violence by offering them and their children a temporary place to live, and much counseling and classroom support along with lots of encouragement. While the film serves that purpose, it seemed to me less focused upon the workings of this institution, in that we see the kinds of staff meetings, interview situations, and classroom settings we have come to expect. What knocks you out are the horrific accounts the women provide of the violence that has been perpetrated upon them. Mostly talked about and not shown, these are tales that accumulate to a dire picture of life in America - often drug and alcohol fueled accounts of a range of abuse and violence as to boggle the mind. Even (or especially) a regular viewer of “Cops” has no idea of the depths of misery that marriage and family life hath wrought. I won’t even try to repeat the stories. They are straightforwardly told by the women one after another after another. Wiseman’s approach seems even more direct than usual - mostly just let the women speak.
If isn’t quite that simple though. The film begins with three visits with the police to homes where this stuff is taking place. They take up about the first twenty minutes of the three-hour film, so we don’t get to The Spring before we see quite clearly the need for such places. The third visit is especially awful, the woman a bloody mess taken away on a stretcher. “Is she gonna take the ride,” a sympathetic policeman asks, meaning I think is she going to get out of there and get some help at The Spring. The police are uniformly patient and careful, seemingly quite accustomed to things that likely look so shocking to us. They seem familiar with the legal issues, psychological aspects, and the inherent volatility of these calls, and as so often in Wiseman films, understand that their institutional role depends upon other players and they may just be the couriers to other places. They’re first responders in potentially lengthy processes.
The stories we hear would suggest that the solution would be just to send the men off to jail, although we already get enough stories of guys who come out after a couple of years and start right up on the same things that jailed them in the first place. It’s as depressing as hearing from the women of times they recanted their accounts of the violence done to them or the many times they returned to the men anyway, for a variety of reasons. Repeated patterns are alluded to quite often - abused children become abuser adults, violent situations happening over and over, lifetimes of not escaping from these miserable and dangerous relationships. This film really sticks to what the women go through in escaping from these situations, as if Wiseman already has in mind that there’s another possible film in what the legal system attempts to do with these messes. Here, our role is mainly to listen, and it’s to the women themselves to a far greater extent than their counselors and helpers that we’re given that opportunity. I was very surprised to see in the numerous classroom situations where the women are coming to some understanding of how they’ve landed there, that we never see the counselor/teachers who are leading them through this process. We do hear them, but I think it’s always off screen - a specific stylistic choice I’d say, as they are too rigorously excluded from view for that to be an accident, in group scene after group scene. If we cut away from a woman speaking, it’s to see other women in the room, and if the counselor is speaking, we still stay on the women listening. (We do see an arm once reach to a blackboard to write “brainwashing” as part of the lesson getting across to the women.) I think this may be a consequence as well of the inherent drama in the stories we hear. Rather than viewing these entirely as classroom teaching situations, they are more like opportunities for the women to get their stories out, stories they’ve had little opportunity to articulate before coming to The Spring. Horrible human situations are the stuff of movie drama too, and Wiseman seems as fascinated in hearing of what humans are capable of doing to each other as he is exploring remedies for these problems. The film is pretty free of claiming solutions. Compassion is genuinely valued and clearly much needed.
When we see how the children who have escaped with their mothers are handled, the skills of The Spring come more clearly into view. The kids range from newborns on up, and in great number. (We hear during a tour that two-thirds of the 1650 served annually are children.) Wiseman takes us through each age group, and includes activities from baby-sitting to classrooms to coping sessions. Especially shocking are the exercises given to kids to draw pictures of encounters between their parents, and stories and images come out which are deftly handled by their kind counselors, and also brought up in staff meetings later as examples of how serious the problems in their homes were. It’s probably just as well that in the worst sounding cases, like a six-year old boy there who has attempted to hang himself, that we only see his case discussed rather than actually seeing the child in question. These stories are sufficiently bad in the indirect way we sometimes hear of them, even if it seems less typical of Wiseman not to always have the direct visual evidence. This way is more than tough enough to witness.
This film is sufficiently Wisemanesque to provide us a sense of the range of societal problems that touch upon this one, and also to present domestic violence itself in considerably scary a variety. The forms of physical violence feel near encyclopedic, down to a husband setting his house on fire while his wife is closed off in a room. The strategies of verbal abuse and manipulation get more complicated and grislier the longer they’re explained, and the women are doing a lot of the figuring out themselves. When the staff meet among themselves to discuss cases, it’s usually to express disbelief that an offending husband has been treated lightly by the criminal justice system or to speak in upbeat terms of the progress they hope the women are making. I’d say another contribution this film makes is in detailing so many instances of sexual abuse, clearly a problem that documentaries have difficulty approaching dispassionately. Domestic Violence suggests that the system is pushed to its limits by what people are capable of doing to each other. Police, courts, and places like The Spring may do what they can, but once again, the problems are huge and it’s admirable that even some ways to try to help have been found.
A couple of other structuring elements are worth mentioning, as they seem unique to this film. When we do get to The Spring, we stay in something like chronological order for a time, watching entry interviews with women who have just arrived, or who may still have not quite extricated themselves from their violent situations. The one-on-one encounters between the women and The Spring staff make us feel like we’re just at the start of the process, and the whole film has the rough feel of what a single day might be like, even though it was filmed over the typical month or two that Wiseman generally spends. The additional twist comes at the end, when we leave The Spring for a last sad visit along with the police on a domestic violence call, as a final reminder of the difference between the relative calm and helpful atmosphere of The Spring compared to the situations these women come from. We don’t come full circle in the sense that the woman being threatened isn’t on her way to The Spring. Rather, we have a Wiseman situation that doesn’t resolve simply. What we see is a return to the ongoing problems that our initial police visits also showed. By not ending at The Spring, we’re not left with the impression that the problem is on the way to being solved. We start and end with grim situations that hopefully women like those we’ve seen in The Spring won’t return to. It’s a horrible problem and a troubling film.