For a guy who’s made nine films in New York City, a town in Indiana with about a thousand people might seem like an odd idea, but the two films I’d bring up to counter that would be Sinai Field Mission and State Legislature, the first because you couldn’t have a more isolated location than that and the second to suggest he hasn’t entirely ignored the middle of the country. And if we throw in as well that Belfast has a population of about 6,500, then Monrovia, Indiana doesn’t feel like so wide a departure. It’s a bold choice, granted, but it’s entirely in keeping with Wiseman’s considerable breadth of subject and location. A small mostly rural town in the Midwest is just another checkbox, and wherever he goes, it’s still a community, with the same cinematic opportunities as the previous forty or so have presented.
By now I should have these films pretty well figured out, but Monrovia, Indiana is a challenge. When I first saw it a couple of years ago on PBS, it felt something like a Whitmanesque slice of Americana, a poem to the heartland. This time, I couldn’t help but see it as more akin to the death of an era and mindset that wasn’t being all that mourned. Rather than choose between those poles, I think I’ll go at them both, because I think the film is open enough to allow for different reactions, not just from one person to another, but within a single viewer such as myself. It’s not that there’s a more accessible surface and then lots of hidden meanings. It may just be that from one year to the next, a complex film can look very different.
I may have spoken a little too soon a couple of days ago about three Wiseman films concerned with places In Transition. I didn’t realize another one was coming that has a big component of that. There are at least a couple of major changes being charted in Monrovia, Indiana. The place isn’t too small not to have a town government, and what they fight out in three meetings is what some see as a threat to their way of life. No, it’s not Democrats or antifa or immigrants. As this was 76% Trump country in 2016 and a google check shows they repeated again in 2020, we already know how they might feel about all that. And just as State Legislature never mentioned a political party, in this film Trump or national politics are never mentioned. (Quick shot at a street fair of a Republican booth is about it, but there too no visible signs for major candidates, even though we’re in the heart of Pence country.) The way Wiseman structures the three meetings is a marvel of logic and rigor, but they’re pretty widely spaced in the film, so only post-film sorting out might reveal the pattern. The first meeting has a consultant speak about what they can do for economic development, because “Monrovia will continue to suffer without people”. They worry about their tax base and they seem to want to attract business, but they don’t want the people that would be part of that shift, or at least that’s one of the open disputes. The figure of 600 to 700 new people is tossed around, and in a Wiseman End of Scene Line, another counters with “We have room for more people than that, we just have to figure out where. That’s kind of it in a nutshell.” The problem becomes more concrete in the next meeting an hour or so later in the film, when it comes out that there’s a fairly recent housing development called the Homestead that’s wanting to add 151 more homes, and that’s caused considerable ire from the outset. “There was a contingency of people in this community that didn’t believe Homestead shouldn’t have been put there.” Double negatives aside, feelings are strong. “We should control what we have and not allow any more of a mess to be created.” Some argue for more growth, and for “positives” on their side one guy credits “a state football championship, which a lot of those kids came from Homestead.” The dispute at this meeting was supposed to be about a road to a second entrance to Homestead, but it quickly degenerates into a is-the-whole-area-going-to-hell kind of argument. When one complains about how much worse things have been since Homestead was built, an End of Scene Line from another is “We may have a few bad apples here and there, but that’s everywhere.” Since the last presidential election, “bad apples” is an uncomfortable expression to hear, as that’s how Trump blamed away a police shooting in Kenosha. The problems turn even more Wisemanesque at the later third meeting, in that we get no clearer to a resolution and the tale takes a further uncomfortable turn. Now it’s about the Kafkaesque situation of fire hydrants in Homestead that aren’t really fire hydrants. A befuddled Homestead homeowner says, reasonably, that no one told him when he bought his house “that’s not really a fire hydrant there. We’ve seen these red things sticking up out of the ground where you connect hoses to and assumed that was a fire hydrant.” The dispute now is over who has jurisdiction for supplying water to the hydrants - the water department or the fire department - the kind of bureaucratic absurdity Wiseman has located before. Some of the same faces seize upon this problem to lament the social ills that this kind of “high-density housing” has brought to their town. “Is there a solution to this?” one asks, “We can’t really do anything about it?” The distinct impression one is left with is that some of the old-timers would be just as happy with Homestead burning to the ground the first time those unconnected hydrants were needed. We don’t need to be told this is Pence country to see clearly where we are. If this is how they feel about seeing that water is connected to a fire hydrant, no need to move on to larger social problems.
Before moving to other grim stuff, maybe we should give the place a more benign take for a bit, and notice at least that as with Aspen and Belfast, Wiseman certainly appreciates nature and its many visual possibilities. This is corn country, and it may not be as high as an elephant’s eye, but shots of fields rustling in the wind abound, and aspects of agricultural life get a fair amount of attention. We can certainly see some of the appeal of small-town and rural life. Perhaps oddly, many of the agriculture scenes are wordless - fields being swept over by expensive farm machinery, dried corn filling large tanker trucks, more of that wind blowing through fields. Moving into town, such as it is, the commercial district seems to consist of a pizza place, a tattoo parlor, a coffee shop, a hair salon for men and women, and not much else. We visit them all, and get some nice Wiseman Process sequences - a local version of strombolis (made commendably with fresh dough), burgers and fries prepared, a bunch of older people getting hair worked on, all of this pretty much without dialog but with the nice Wiseman Vignette economy we’ve come to expect. The tattoo parlor has an already heavily tattooed biker getting one more on his arm, and he gets the only line: “I’m bleeding more than last time.” I think we saw versions of similar shops in Jackson Heights, but somehow there all of it seemed more varied and distinctive. Unlike Belfast, we don’t get any sense of local problems like crime or drugs, it’s just a place that loves its football and basketball (all we hear about in a quick visit to the high school) and of course there’s a good-sized gun shop too, though played mostly for humor. What maybe gets more interesting is some of the shady salesmanship in evidence. Two pretty wild examples that almost slip by are a mattress sale in the high school gym where the salesman holds up a jar of water and makes claims about how much sweat, dead skin, and dust mites a mattress will collect in a decade, in order to add a waterproof protector to his sale. And it’s amusing but equally suspicious when we see a display of Zilis CBD products at a street fair, and hear claims of how the company is ending world hunger and making massive donations to Haiti, along with a crazy list of all the ailments their products claim to heal. (I’ll spare you. But you can google Zilis and get quick results like “Is Zilis a scam? No, but it’s a pyramid scheme in disguise.”) We’re maybe not at the level of quackery we saw in Aspen, but it still looks pretty shady. More straightforward, and quite funny I thought, is a sequence at the local liquor store, where the only dialog is a montage of the guy at the cash register announcing the amount of each sale, which he does about fifteen times. I had started this paragraph thinking I was going to note the appealing small-town Americana I had recalled from my first viewing, and now that I’ve tried to locate it, I realize the film maybe was never the possibly rosy portrait I might have thought could be constructed as one way to look at the film. And this was without mentioning the dog tail-shortening operation at the local vets, of course shown to us in full Wiseman medical detail. (And maybe another example of a commercial activity less than essential.) At least when we see pigs loaded into a truck to be driven off, it’s left to our imaginations or our recall of Meat to understand what they’re on their way to. (And just to make sure I get it in, I must remark that this is the third film after National Gallery where I’d continue to argue that Wiseman style has shifted to include extensive portraiture, slow close-ups of faces in audiences as if he’s aware he’s creating cinematic museums for the ages. He definitely didn’t do this in earlier films, and now it’s part of every one.)
So back to the grim side, I’m glad we’ve already been noticing Wiseman’s growing interest in aging and death, because these become practically the overwhelming subject of this film, together with a heavy dose of religion in service mostly of the same ends - telling congregants how much better off they’ll be in Heaven than here on Earth. If sermons in other Wiseman films were sometimes ambiguous, here it’s the straight stuff, beginning with a Bible study class that lays the blame squarely at our own feet for all of life’s miseries, saying about God that “when he started this thing, everything was perfect. We brought the tribulations on ourselves,” which becomes another pretty good End of Scene Line. We’re only 24 minutes in when we get our first cemetery, full of old tombstones including those of several veterans of either the Civil War or World War I. It won’t be our last cemetery, as we’ll see. When we hang out with local townspeople in coffee shops or at a local fair, we see the film’s other big transition - a generation is dying out, and not without a heavy dose of remembrance of what their lives have been like. We get a big serving of it in high school, where a class session is actually devoted to a history of local sports going back to the 1920’s, with later UCLA basketball coach John Wooden among the few local celebrities. A student in the front row only yawns once during the teacher’s recitation. At the literally named Cafe on the Corner, we get the first of several versions of Old Guys Sitting Around and Talking, this time mostly about the fellow who’s doing physical therapy every morning since his recent gall bladder surgery, which leads them to recount other recent surgeries they have knowledge of. “I still don’t have the zip I think I ought to have. I’m running out of gas.” This pretty much describes a big chunk of the local population. We get our tribute-to-someone’s-life scene fairly early rather than as a finale, as has usually been the case when we’ve had these. (By my count, Aspen, The Store, Racetrack, Blind, and La Comédie-Française are five others besides this one where we’ve had these life-summing-up tributes.) This one is especially sad, in a sparsely attended Masonic Lodge meeting for a “deserving brother” getting his 50 year award. The poor guy looks barely able to stand and he never speaks, and we get a pseudo-biblical recitation along the way about the stages of life, and it looks like there are about a half dozen other surviving members. The walls are full of photos of past members, presumably dead by this point. When the ceremony is over, the End of Scene Line is “That concludes our ceremony for our Brother Bauer” and it feels like we might as well head straight to the cemetery. It’s almost moving if it weren’t so quirky when we return again later to the Cafe on the Corner, and this group of Old Guys starts listing the names of friends who have recently died. One talks about the apparently popular practice there of showing videos at their funerals going back to the first grade, and one wistfully reports “I remember them like that”, and they all agree they’ve known each other since their first day of school up to now. “We’re pretty lucky, ain’t we” one of the group says, that this little bunch is still alive. From there, the only place to go is to talk about friends who now have cancer and are unable any longer to drive. And driving comes up again in another big reminiscence, more Old Guys sitting around at a Car Show, where one tells a story of buying beer when he was fifteen and then starts listing every car he owned in the 1960’s and how much he paid for it. Wiseman visually nails the age thing at this same show, and I hope you noticed it, when two guys on acoustic guitars do a decent version of the Charley Pride song “Before I Met You” while seated behind them is a guy who looks to be about 100 gamely but extremely slowly plays along on his violin.
The getting old meets its inevitable end in the amazing final twenty minutes or so, a funeral that will start in a church ceremony with another extended minister’s talk and which will continue to graveside and beyond, becoming a kind of Process sequence in itself. If Wiseman already did Near Death, now we’ve got Death. The lady who has departed was 74, and during her service, while we don’t get a video, we do see a photo montage of her life. The hammy sermon plays heavily on that idea from the beginning Bible Study, of how full of misery our lives are but better things will come once we’re in heaven. “One day I’ll be sleeping when death knocks on my door, and I’ll awake to find I’m not homesick anymore. I’ll be home where I belong.” I thought he might have been reciting Biblical scripture, but yet another google search reveals this to be from a popular Christian song, although he’s speaking for himself when he says “It’s our tendency to become troubled, to become burdened”, sounding very like the “tribulations” that started our film. His bizarre turn comes when he tells a story about a scar left from a kidney transplant which he likens to the scar on Jesus’ body, and we do get a good bit of storytelling about the deceased, almost as if the minister was one of those guys at the Cafe on the Corner. We might think we could end things right there, but after a few last shots of corn fields, we see a cemetery once more, and we might think again that a montage of tombstones could also be the conclusion, but we wind up graveside with the same preacher continuing the same funeral. After a prayer, the smaller group sings “Amazing Grace” and there are a few more shots of the cemetery, and then the casket is slowly lowered down in the ground. Amazingly, even that isn’t the end, and we watch dirt piled into the hole from a dump truck, and still more with two guys with shovels piling on more dirt. Then the empty dump truck drives away, and a caretaker is left putting flowers from the funeral on top of the grave. To the sounds of birds chirping, the soundtrack of the cemetery, the end credits begin, and this is another set of Wiseman end credits where sound continues to the very end, this time that chirping of cemetery birds. We’re a long way from those upbeat fireworks and “Cielito Lindo” that were the conclusion of In Jackson Heights. If ever a film were elegiac, it’s this one. For someone whose films don’t follow a chronology, you can’t get more final than this.