By James Bowman on 6.28.07 @ 12:02AM
Perhaps as honest a debate about abortion as one might expect from a pair of pro-choice documentary filmmakers.
Perhaps the most revealing as well as the most dramatic moment
of Unborn in the USA comes near the end when an anonymous
young woman confronts the Rev. Matt Trewhella. The director of an
organization called "Missionaries to the Preborn," Mr. Trewhella
travels the country with a group of supporters, many of them
children, who hold up giant posters of aborted fetuses by the sides
of busy highways. The young woman, who claims to be pro-life and a
churchgoer herself, doesn't like to have to see such things and
tells him so. The Rev. Matt tells her that he's glad she's upset --
that, in fact, it is what he was going for, since most people are
simply indifferent to the fate of these poor innocents. Thereupon,
the woman screams at him: "You're creating indifference! You're
creating indifference by doing this!"
Unfortunately, he doesn't have the wit to reply: "Yeah, I can
see that now," but the tragi-comedy of the moment is not lost.
Subsequently, he either calls her a daughter of Satan or she thinks
he does, and she assaults him on camera. There is a scuffle, and
the police take her away in handcuffs. There is a similar kind of
indirectness about the powerful emotions aroused on both sides of
the abortion question -- as if people can't bear to acknowledge
what's really upsetting them. They look away from it as from Matt
Trewhella's gruesome posters. It is, therefore, much to the credit
of the film-makers, Stephen Fell and Will Thompson, who began it as
a student project when they were seniors at Rice University, that
they manage for the most part to survey the landscape of
confrontation between pro-life and pro-choice forces at its messier
end without becoming emotional -- or overt partisans --
themselves.
Not that they don't have a point of view. The film's subtitle --
"Inside the War on Abortion" -- as well as its quotation right at
the outset from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent from the
Supreme Court's decision upholding the ban on partial birth
abortion makes their own pro-choice sympathies clear. But they know
they can rely on the prejudices of a liberal audience -- and,
increasingly, the audience for all films apart from the most
witless blockbusters can be assumed to be liberal -- to supply the
indignation at what, to the pro-lifers who are mostly unlikely to
see it, would hardly raise an eyebrow.
For instance, the woman in Elmira, New York, who spends her life
modeling in clay fetuses at all stages of development is likely to
strike those of pro-life sympathies as poignantly devout, while
pro-choicers may well see her as nuts. Likewise, the film's journey
inside the training program for pro-life activists at Focus on the
Family's headquarters in Colorado Springs can hardly avoid the
whiff of left-wing conspiracy theory about the hidden potency of
the dark forces of the right. There is also a bit of a Michael
Moore moment when the film-makers' absurdity-detectors zero in on a
young man offering up a long prayer, during which he chokes himself
up with his own compassion for the unborn, while chewing gum.
Mostly, however, Messrs. Fell and Thompson eschew sardonic
commentary or ridiculous subjects and allow the pro-life activists
who are their main subject a fair opportunity to tell their own
story in their own way. Only once do they step in to "correct" the
views of a pro-life subject. When a woman claims from personal
experience that there is "definitely a link between abortion and
breast cancer," they hustle onto the screen a card informing us
that the "overwhelming medical consensus" is that there is not. Do
tell!
Yet I don't quite like the built-in tendentiousness of the
film's interviews with a couple of apologists for violence against
abortion clinics and doctors. True, these are balanced by a priest
who says that such people are really more like the enemy: "They're
pro-choice," he says, "because the pro-choice movement has been
telling us for decades that sometimes it's OK to end a life to
solve a problem." But the presence of such people in the
documentary suggests -- and is meant to suggest -- a logical and
moral continuum between the peaceful protesters and the killers.
Perhaps bringing the latter into the argument is just the
film-makers' way of averting their gaze from some of
abortion's less savory moral implications.
The point in the end is the rather banal one that feelings run
high on both sides. And, as the incident with the young woman and
Mr. Trewhella illustrates, feelings rather than dispassionate moral
reasoning are inevitably what the documentary camera -- like all
cameras -- seeks out. This may be fair enough, but the film ought
to do more to try to sort out the honest feelings from the other
kind. I wonder if it can be done?
topics:
Abortion, Supreme Court
