I figured out early on that lots of the films I really love are deeply ambiguous - films that present different versions of events, flashback movies that repeat time to alter original views, elliptical films that leave things out, stuff in movies that’s shown in some indirect manner, answers that are never given, endings that don’t resolve clearly. Here’s just a few maybe obvious titles of this sort: Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Haneke’s Cache, Lean’s Brief Encounter, Antonioni’s Blow Up - the list can go on and on. Ambiguity is tied to complexity - complicated movies showing things in non-obvious ways. These movies always seemed most interesting because they required close attention and often repeated viewing. They didn’t yield their rewards easily. Also, this seemed closer to how the world works - reality has rarely felt simple. This also led me to cinema verite, direct cinema, or whatever you want to call them - non-fiction films. And some non-fiction film-makers like Errol Morris or Michael Moore, because unpredictable things happened in their movies, they were funny, and they had an appreciation (particularly Morris) for the complexity of looking for truth. Lots of documentaries I just don’t like, because too many of them argue for a single way to look at things, or preach at you, and even when I agree with what they’re pushing, I dislike in movies being told how I should think.
So Wiseman has always felt right up my alley, and seeing Juvenile Court again reminds me of a frequent important interest of his, a strong preference for the unsolvable problem or the situation with no simple solution. If a scene keeps going on, it’s not moving towards clarity or resolution, it’s moving toward complexity and likely a feeling that while we might have an opinion about what we’re viewing, we likely can’t have an answer, in the sense that we know what the film is espousing. That’s a bold film-making move, and Wiseman makes it all the time. I think I mentioned regarding Hospital that it started to be a big deal when we followed someone from one segment to another. In Juvenile Court that really takes a jump forward, with at least three major sections devoted to specific cases and kids, the last one taking up more than half an hour. As Wiseman films get longer (this one is 144 minutes, up from the 90 or so of all those preceding it), they don’t get longer because of an increased number of segments, they get longer because the segments get longer.
I think we better talk briefly about this scene, segment, episode, or whatever business - what we should call the pieces of a Wiseman film. While sometimes we see the same people in successive parts of a film or they return later, Wiseman films are not structured around following a single character. None of his films are named for a person - they’re named after institutions or locations. This is complicated too by another major thing we’ll get around to discussing and which is pretty bold too - his films are not chronological and often have few indicators of time. One segment may have been filmed weeks after the one previous, or it could have happened well before. We really don’t know, and it pretty much doesn’t matter. We can consider the films like a connection of snapshots or impressions which have been carefully ordered by Wiseman for reasons that have nothing to do with actual time.
That said, we do have parts where there are apparent continuities of either people or time or both. That is, the films can have something resembling episodes or stories. What’s curious though is that many pieces can be really brief - a short conversation, a single activity - and when something is going to go on longer, we just don’t know until it happens. That’s one of the things we’re watching for - will this next thing last thirty seconds or thirty minutes? We’ll just have to see it unfold, and it gives us a chance to consider at all times what Wiseman is up to. We can be mindful of his choices, what’s going on that warrants us staying where we are or following someone from this place to the next, because the movie doesn’t require it if there’s no reason for it. The feeling that everything is here because it’s interesting and it’s showing us something we should watch is really strong in his films. Really, they’re never boring, or at least so far. You just come to trust that there’s stuff going on worth seeing. It sounds simple, but it’s actually a big deal.
So let’s start at the end of Juvenile Court, the longest episode, of an almost eighteen year old boy who drove the car in two small robberies and could be tried as an adult for armed robbery and we’re told, maybe correctly or not, that he could get the electric chair for it if he’s tried as an adult. Even though one activity in Juvenile Court is an actual court, we never see anything that looks like an actual jury trial, even though there are lots of lawyers, a judge, and rooms that look like trials could take place there. A judge is always in charge, and he’s going to decide whether a kid is guilty, whether the case should be passed elsewhere, or what a punishment should be. He can take discussions into chambers, which happens when he wants to talk to a kid somewhat more privately, and then they go back and he announces what he’s going to do. As the case of this supposed armed robber enfolds, complication after complication gets added. He says he was forced to drive for the robberies by his somewhat more adult accomplice, there are recountings of a drug history, family problems, personal issues, a lawyer who took his case that morning, a possibly lying police report, and just a wealth of additional messiness. The kid claims his innocence, but we’re watching a forced decision in motion. The judge has him down as guilty of something, and he’s going to work out the solution. He may well be right, but like I warned, it’s far from a clear resolution. The kid’s going to be forced to do time at some sort of occupational training facility (I think we could call it a juvenile jail) for an indeterminate period, no matter how much he says he’s not guilty. It’s a rough situation, and that’s why it merits the length it gets. It shows the institution giving this matter serious attention, but there’s an outcome that it’s very difficult to feel comfortable about.
Earlier in the film there are a couple of other cases that get maybe half the attention as this final one, something like fifteen minutes each, so it feels like about half the film is devoted to these three situations. One of those is a kid who took LSD, and somehow he winds up in a room with not just a juvenile court counselor but also with two weird guys who try to talk the kid into a religious conversion as the way out of his problems. After some persuading, he acts like he’s ready to along with this. It’s only in a scene shortly after, when the teenager is with his mother, that she is completely skeptical about this plan, telling him “you’ve been given a Bible before and you didn’t do anything about it.” This case eventually reaches the judge, and we see the two religious zealots give it another try, before we go into the judge’s chambers for extended discussions with counselors and the boy himself. The judge has maybe seen too many cases like this before, and decides that he’s not buying any of the boy’s claims of going straight or any of the adults' suggestions of how he might be helped. Instead, based on a past with some other drug offenses, the judge decides it’s time for him to be handled more seriously and the judge waives jurisdiction and says he should be tried in adult criminal court ("held for prosecution”). Here too, there’s no actual trial, and while there’s quite a lot of patient discussion and consideration of alternatives, the actual decision of the judge feels very harsh.
The third lengthy case is a tricky one too, a fifteen-year-old boy babysitter accused of inappropriate touching of a four year old girl. Here, the judge considers a polygraph test, but there’s also lots of talk about the boy’s past problems and whether warnings would suffice. A bigger problem may be the young girl’s mother, who sounds like she’s always overly wary of what a babysitter might do (a counselor points out to the judge that she’s “preoccupied” by this issue). When he speaks with the boy, this is another time when we hear that the penalty for this crime in an adult court is the electric chair, but the boy still protests emphatically his innocence. In further discussion without him present, we hear here as well about his family problems (the judge had already labelled him a “mixed up kid”). For this one we see no resolution beyond a decision to give him a polygraph test, but we again have a pretty horrific problem see saw back and forth through ambiguous accounts of what took place and what might be done to deal with it.
Some parts of Juvenile Court proceed more along the lines of previous Wiseman films, vignettes of counselors dealing for a few minutes with individual cases. It seemed a little clearer in these parts that Wiseman had certain organizations in mind. Early in the film, nearly every problem revolved around parental neglect or mistreatment, situations where the kids were more victims than perpetrators. Pretty carefully laid out as well in a series of segments are the variety of approaches the institution takes to deal with juvenile problems - they may go from lots of counselling, and on to scolding, long lectures, or sympathetic talks. There’s also a very concerned chaplain who deals with one case. Then we’ve got the declaring for Christ option, and from there on to the actual court proceedings that can lead to some sort of juvenile detention or else moving a serious case to adult courts. The welter of options gives the impression of an institution trying, with little sense of any of it being all that successful.
It also comes out that what’s called a juvenile court actually deals with a whole variety of activities. (Loose boundaries of responsibility seem like a regular feature that Wiseman brings out.) Besides serving as an actual court, although one where cases are always decided by a judge, the place also appears to serve as some kind of holding facility or detention center itself for some cases. (We even get a quick haircutting a la Basic Training.) We also get a number of placements into foster homes, either decisions to do it, or once we see a lovely woman who has come to take two children away. And as I mentioned, there seem to be lots of cases of either counselors, probation officers, doctors, a chaplain, or police who around to deal with cases. A lot of them seem very caring, some rather on the aggressive side, and whatever the treatments, the problems brought before them of crimes, neglect, terrible treatment, and the rest, seem large and serious. With a bit of humor, though, Wiseman shows a phone operator who has to route calls to the many different departments, connecting them to the various areas of responsibility like custody support payments, setting court dates, speaking to their child, and the like. She’s doing it all out loud and manually, while today it’s probably a voice mail asking the caller to press 1 for a court date, and so on. And speaking of change, it’s so noticeable that everybody seems to smoke in confined rooms here. The early seventies were definitely before no smoking in public buildings had begun.
I’ve rambled a bit here, but I think the central theme has been that this is a film that deals with some key Wiseman issues - how does an institution interact with those it’s meant to serve, and from there to great larger problems of what is proper behavior, what to do with people who fall outside the norm, and to a large extent here, how do we know what’s true. Knowing how truth is determined is always a great issue, and obviously a polygraph or a judge’s decision don’t always provide comfortable answers. Having these situations of serious ambiguity really encourages us to consider these questions for ourselves. These are larger and more important matters than whether this place is doing a good job or not. As always, Wiseman seems to go for considerations well beyond what conventional documentaries would be asking.