Doc Watch: Past Sins

13TH (A-minus) - Filmmaker Ava DuVernay ("Selma," "I Will Follow") aims for a great and definitive, but she can't quite put it all together, instead crafting a very good documentary about the prison-industrial complex's devastating impact on black America.

Her springboard is the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery but made an exception for those who have committed a crime. For 150 years, that carve-out has been exploited as a way of enslaving blacks in a legal fashion.

The numbers make you shudder: the U.S. houses one-quarter of all the world's prisoners, more than 2 million incarcerated, 35 percent of them blacks (who make up about 12 percent to 13 percent of the U.S. population. More black men monitored by the criminal justice system than were slaves during the 1850s.

This is a powerful story, and DuVernay is compiling in one place a bunch of treatises, statistics and anecdotes in a way that drives the message home viscerally. The filmmaker is in supreme command of her subject. She assembles an impressive panel of talking heads, including Van Jones, Henry Louis Gates, Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and the legendary Angela Davis.

Yet ... I sometimes had trouble getting in sync with the pace of the narrative. DuVernay likes to flash song lyrics, mostly rap and hip-hop, on the screen in big type, as if she's making a YouTube sing-along video. As if afraid of coming off as too visually conventional, she positions her talking heads in odd configurations -- for instance, placing one interviewee about halfway down a hallway; others sit in front of stylized brick walls.

There's no need to gild the story with distractions. DuVernay connects the dots from the Civil War to the civil rights era and then a modern parade of presidents -- mainly Reagan and Clinton -- who grew the U.S. prison population exponentially with the war on drugs, three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and political opportunism, as Democrats figured out they could get elected by outflanking the Republicans and getting "tough on crime." It puts Clintonism in an unflattering light, perhaps offering insight in the wake of last month's election. (Perhaps summed up in a quick '90s clip of Hillary Clinton's infamous reference to "super-predators.")

This is a compelling issue, and DuVernay, who constantly seems to be on the brink of being a great filmmaker, takes another step toward achieving that goal by presenting an urgent story in a concise way. It's as if she is presenting an entire sequel to Ken Burns' "Civil War" series in 100 minutes. If she had pulled it off perfectly, it would have been quite a feat.

PERVERT PARK (B) - This look at sex offenders going through a transitional reintegration program at a Florida mobile home park pulls off a neat trick -- it humanizes these people who have committed some of the most horrific crimes you can imagine.

The Swedish-Danish filmmaking couple Frida and Lasse Barkfors spent several years hanging out with the residents of the Palace trailer park, where these folks who have served their prison time live in a controlled environment and attend group therapy sessions. None of them are shy about describing both their offenses and their tough upbringings, surprisingly matter-of-fact at times.

William is the de factor host/narrator, the caretaker for the park and a bit of a mother hen to the others. He was fondled by a baby-sitter from the age of 6. As an adult, his wife and infant child were killed in a road accident with a drunken driver, consuming him with guilt and grief. Eventually he remarries and is convicted for acting inappropriately in front of a step-daughter.

James is young, paying the price for falling for a sheriff's internet sting and showing up to what he thought would be the house of a woman who wanted him to have sex with her 14-year-old daughter. Tracy was serially abused by her father, for years. She never properly processed that over-sexualization, and as an adult she resumed a sexual relationship with her father and then started abusing her son, at the urging of a boyfriend. Tracy's story anchors the middle of the film, as she tearfully purports to be telling details of the story for the first time.

A common theme here is the childhood abuse suffered by these offenders, who could not stop that cycle once they became adults. A counselor who leads the group sessions refers to them as victims. And it speaks to the skill of the Barkforses that they take great care with their subject, refusing to sugarcoat anything, and manage to wring true emotion from these "monsters," as William tells us the offenders are called by outsiders.

We see them going about their mundane daily tasks. We see them socializing at depressing potlucks. It is tough not to see them as horrifically distorted versions of ourselves.

BONUS TRACK
Duvernay talks about "13th":