American Chaos

American Chaos

In this situation, the name “American Chaos” is like a club that people can use to hit the film over the head. Directed by Jim Stern (“Every Little Step”), it is an earnest yet formless movie that tries to take stock of the United States in 2016. The narrative follows the presidential election from the primary season through to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s contest with Republican Donald Trump, who won and may be understood as a primary author of said chaos.

How did we get here? asks Stern. Were there warnings that everyone ignored? What legitimate qualities did Trump voters see in their candidate and which ones did they wrongly project onto him for their own, possibly inscrutable reasons? What tangible, credible alternative did he offer to Clinton? Were her flaws correctly assessed or inflated? Did anyone involved in the process or anyone in the voting population operate from a detached, rational perspective, or has the entire country descended into mindless tribalism?

Stern, who exudes avuncular pot-stirring Everyman/Host energy at all times, poses these questions and more as he travels around the country. Some are explicit; others are implied; still others are probably imagined by this viewer out of frustration with a movie that can’t figure out what it is. More than most election-year postmortems, this one will yield subjective and admittedly unreliable takeaways, with some viewers feeling that Stern doesn’t do enough to interrogate Trump-voter talking points and others feeling that he talks too much as it is and is only doing a passable impersonation of an evenhanded guide when he’s actually coming from a deeply partisan place.

But whatever your takeaway might be, it will be hard to shake the feeling that “American Chaos” needs work: a structure or another draft or two or at least some mean notes demanding to know what it’s supposed to be saying with its self-serious hand-wringing. As an attempt to understand the opposition (Stern tells us straight-out that he’s a Chicago Democrat who grew up idolizing Robert Kennedy), it gets a B for effort, if you’re feeling generous.

But it is also disorganized and erratic, bouncing from thesis to thesis and location to location, sometimes seeming to pride itself on adopting a nonjudgmental “I’m just listening” attitude, other times recoiling in disbelief and outrage when, say, a Trump voter suggests that a hypothetical president to be (in this case Clinton) has the power to simply abolish the Second Amendment of the Constitution immediately after taking office, and strongly implies that killing her with a firearm is an acceptable answer to his ignorance stoked fears.

Sometimes Stern sees fit to correct Trump voters’ more egregious or bewildering statements on the spot; other times he does it with supplemental interviews featuring historians, sociologists and other expert sources, many of whom come across visually and vocally as stereotypically aghast “coastal elite” caricatures conforming to stereotype as surely as the Trump voters with their potbellies and drawls and regurgitated Breitbart/Fox News Channel stories do.

Occasionally you will meet a person who is truly unique, like the older lady who calls herself a “Mensa member” and is certain that Donald Trump alone stands between us and the abyss. There is no rhyme or reason to when Stern decides to become engaged and active and when he hangs back and strokes his chin and smiles warmly. Sometimes he seems to be on a deeply empathetic listening tour; at other times he seems to be giving his guests enough rope with which to hang themselves (an exercise in futility, surely, since Trump won, and as I write this, remains president).

For the most part, “American Chaos” traffics in the same imagery, locales and political reportage clichés that make your eyes roll when you encounter them in The New York Times: The jes’ folks nearly always white, usually middle aged or elderly holding court in diners or bars in towns where the milk train don’t stop no more. Stern goes to the border, where white Americans (and one Mexican-American) compare undocumented immigrants to foreign invaders.

He goes to Matewan, W.Va., for what seem like feebly stitched-together reasons that support some muddled thesis about (I think?) Democrats being Hatfields while Republicans are McCoys of an Appalachian culture war. He puts forth a theory that in every U.S. presidential race from the 1950s through 2008 (but not 2016), the more charismatic candidate whom voters would most like to have a beer with has won even though by his own admission not every race proves this point; 1972 is at best a tossup, and 2000 doesn’t really fit any template at all that I can see.

There are visits to coal mines in West Virginia that haven’t been operational for years but now serve mostly as museums of obsolete industrial technology. This is part of a slight digression about the impact of industrial change on politics and rhetoric. It’s not especially interesting at first, but then Stern fleshes it out to the point where it seems as if it might have been fashioned into a leaner, sharper, more incisive feature than the one he wound up making.

As he points out, the white working-class industrial laborers whom Trump fetishized throughout his campaign (one of his few areas of rhetorical overlap with the white American left, strangely) were never going to get their old jobs back, even if those industries revived themselves in full flower because automation is now and ever shall be.

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