COVER-UP (B+) - Laura Poitras makes a pilgrimage to the knee of the granddaddy of investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh, and he curmudgeonly sits for her camera and shares stories, from his breakthrough reporting on the atrocities in Vietnam to his late-career missteps.
The first third of the documentary is devoted to the defining story of Hersh's career: his unmasking of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, orchestrated by Lt. William Calley. It is bookended with what is essentially the capstone to his career, his exposing of the torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq two decades ago for the New Yorker. In between, Poitras seeks to dig beneath the stoic exterior of a man who guards his privacy as well as he protects his sources. (He also gets his due for his efforts, competing against Woodward and Bernstein, to break his share of Watergate stories for the New York Times.)
Poitras ("Citizenfour," "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed"), working with co-director Mark Obenhaus, borrows Errol Morris' tactics and plants her camera firmly in front of Hersh, and she places another one above him, sneaking glimpses at his archived notes. At one point she gets him to break down and threaten to halt the proceedings over her invasive questioning. She mixes in old clips of Hersh interviews and pieces it all together neatly.
Hersh comes off as a diehard soldier devoted to policing abuses of power. His personality is a bit of a tough nut to crack (his take on his gruff parents speaks volumes), but Poitras does an admirable job of picking at an old warhorse's brain and heart.
THE ALABAMA SOLUTION (A-minus) - Andrew Jarecki ("Capturing the Friedmans," "The Jinx") curates footage from smuggled cell phones to show the horrific conditions in Alabama's state penal system, in an echo of brother Eugene Jarecki's 2013 prison expose "The House I Live In." If you're not numb by now, you'll be shocked and appalled at the treatment of human beings in the deep south.
The scenes in the detention facilities -- blood, standing water, rats, drugged and mentally ill inmates -- might remind you of Geraldo Rivera's harrowing reports from mental institutions in the 1970s or the POW scenes in "The Deer Hunter." Jarecki focuses on a few inmates who communicate through video chats via smuggled smart phones. Robert Earl (aka Kinetik Justice) has done 20 years, five in solitary confinement, and he is an articulate spokesman for the rights of inmates. Melvin Ray is a jailhouse lawyer desperately trying to get the federal government to intervene. As he notes, it has always taken the feds to fix Alabama's ills, ever since Reconstruction; this time, the state is better equipped to fight off the U.S. Justice Department.
Key events ratchet up the drama. A mother pushes for answers after her son is brutally beaten to death, almost certainly under false pretenses. We see clips of the smug guard who did the killing, as he smirks through his deposition. We watch the mother, who is on oxygen, struggle to catch her breath and report the latest update after returning from a meeting with impotent prosecutors. The family's lawyer takes on the Sisyphean task of seeking justice; a key witness to the killing fears for his life.
Prisoners go on strike, withholding their free labor; that provokes a brutal crackdown meant to starve the men into submission. Earl is beaten and placed in solitary confinement; he takes video of rats swimming in his toilet. This is the belly of the beast. And Jarecki's camera refuses to blink or make these medieval conditions appear more palatable than they are.
A SAVAGE ART (B-minus) - One of the most celebrated political cartoonists of the modern era gets his due with this documentary subtitled "The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant." It's mostly a hagiography -- Oliphant's daughter is an executive producer, and his son is essentially the narrator -- but the artist's powerful work pierces the platitudes.
A trio of filmmakers cobble together archival footage and clips of old interviews over the years with Oliphant, an Australian native who came to the United States in 1964, in his late 20s, to take over as political cartoonist at the Denver Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize within three years. (He would later denounce the honor.) In the '70s he moved to the Washington Star, where his profile was heightened considerably in the nation's capital.
The documentary can be a little hard to follow at times, as it jumps back and forth in time and grabs snippets of interviews of Oliphant from a variety of sources. It would help, too, if the filmmakers gave the cartoons more time on screen and room to breathe. As it is, the film stands as a reminder of how potent and raw Oliphant's work could be. One scathing attack on the Catholic church is captured in an image of salivating priests chasing a gaggle of frightened children, withe caption, "The running of the altar boys." The origin of Oliphant's mascot, a penguin named Punk who offered pithy comments from the corner of the panel, is explained, and we get a pretty good sense of the artist's irascibility through the years.
The final third confronts both the decline of newspapers and political cartoons and the physical decline of Oliphant, now 90 and nearly blind, who was a respected painter and sculptor, as well, in his later years (in Santa Fe, N.M.). This all could have been just as insightful as an hour-long PBS special, though the in-depth history of cartooning was appreciated, and it certainly did not need his children papering over their father's personal shortcomings (including two divorces). And it could have let more of the work tell the story. Credit is due for the footage of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a Washington Star colleague back in the day, paying tribute to Oliphant with saucy memories delivered at a dinner in his honor.
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