While
the number of attacks and deaths caused by police brutality perpetrated on
black youth in the U.S. has increased in recent years, resulting in strong
currents of outrage, awareness-building and public discourse on the matter of
racism, it can be easy to forget that similarly rooted prejudices have resulted
in equally harrowing deaths elsewhere in the world, particularly the U.K. The
death of Mark Duggan in 2011, in which the British youth was shot by cops
following an intense car chase, feels like it happened a lifetime ago in
retrospect, yet it too followed a similar trajectory to the more recent events
in the U.S., in dividing police forces and black communities into warring
factions, with increased surveillance, aggressive policing, riots and looting
following Duggan’s death.
Director
George Aponsah’s “The Hard Stop” is
not interested in teaching us about who Duggan was so much as using his death
as a means to explore the British youth’s grief-ridden London neighborhood of
Tottenham. The world Aponsah documents is one of immense anger and frustration.
His subjects are Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville, who grew up with
Duggan. They have long felt the animosity from police for being young, black and
male, and have had great difficulty recovering from the death of their
friend. The film follows their life stories through a few years of documented
observation, which mark multiple anniversaries of Duggan’s death and the
investigation that concluded the London Metropolitan Police were not
responsible, which popularized the term “lawful killing.”
Marcus
and Kurtis grew up in the kind of neighborhood in which being a criminal is not
so much a choice as it is an expected career; Kurtis went down this route in
his teens and served time for dealing cocaine. Now he’s trying to get his life
together, looking for legitimate work with a criminal record. He’s forced to
take a job in a nearby town that only allows enough time to commute back to
London on the weekends to see his family. Marcus faces time in prison for
supposedly starting the disastrous riot after Duggan’s death.
“The Hard
Stop” is most successful when it shows the gradual changes that Duggan’s
death has caused in the men’s lives, and its longitudinal focus helps the
viewer sympathize with its subjects. Though for most of the runtime we see
their frustration and anger paramount in their onscreen interviews, by the end
they have begun to use the tragedy as a catalyst to do something good for their
community. Marcus, for example starts mentoring troubled youth, and reaches out
to an ex-cop to see if his kids can meet with convicts (in order to persuade
them from taking the irresistibly well-paid route of drug dealing). Featuring
Marcus and Kurtis as its main subject is an interesting focus for “The
Hard Stop,” and it ultimately proves the sheer preciousness of their lives
and that of their deceased friend. Because black lives matter.
The
Michael Moore formula consists of a few reliable elements: take a pressing
social issue, make some facile comparisons between cultures and societies that
don’t take contradictions or deep data into consideration, try to prove that
America is failing, obtain some funny interviews, and cloyingly insert yourself
into the film as much as possible. Voila, you’ve got yourself a movie! If
that’s a simplistic understanding of his films, please consider his filmmaking
an inspiration for my analysis. But “Where
to Invade Next” comes from a good place, as all Moore documentaries do, and
here Moore embraces the nobleness that he’s trying to illuminate as a guiding
thesis about people learning to become decent human beings through social
systems.
The
abstractness of that argument works for his (and the film’s) benefit here.
Moore pretends to “invade” a bunch of countries, mostly European ones
that have strong social-welfare systems, to suss out the incredible benefits
and systems of living in those societies: free university education, healthy
food served for free in school cafeterias, eight weeks of vacation, and
well-funded women’s health clinics where contraception and abortion are freely
available (that last one is actually explored in Tunisia, where the last
revolution and following defeat of a conservative democratic government led to
an increase in women’s rights). Moore visits each country and pretends to
“invade” them for ideas, taking them back to America for
consideration. When he tells his interview subjects about the way things are
like back home, showing them photos of a disgusting cafeteria meal from an
American high school, for example, he’s met with incredulous and disgusted
looks. “That’s not food,” one chef
says. You might think of such comparisons as quaint instead of illuminating—it’s
like when kids compare and trade their lunch food—but on some level getting
people to talk about their cultural values between Western democracies is
revealing, educational, and necessary viewing for those who think they live in
the best country in the world.
Yet
the most salient point Moore makes in “Where to Invade Next” is that so many of
the ideas explored in the doc are American, historically speaking. The
Norwegian prison system, for example, which treats its prisoners with respect,
is based on the idea found in the U.S. Constitution that punishment should be
neither cruel nor unusual. The film still manages to present these other
societies in that cutesy, utopian fashion that Moore has done in previous work
(like “Sicko”), ignoring the glaring issues and problems those countries face,
but the blanket statements and generalizations, though mostly facile,
definitely raise some interesting questions in “Where to Invade Next.” The film
explains in very simple terms how certain systemic changes—like Finland
mandating that all business boards contain at least 40% women, for example—can
bring about real positive societal change.
