Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman, 2018)

Ordinarily, a sense of ambivalence would indicate that a film-text was richer than usual and had more to offer its viewers. But in the case of Monrovia, Indiana, I think it just points of an overall confusion. Wiseman's worst film in a long time, Monrovia is both painfully one-note and highly unclear in terms of what it wants its audience to take away from it. At times it even feels less like an exploration of the filmmaker's own curiosities than the rote satisfaction of an assignment.

There is absolutely nothing surprising about Monrovia, Indiana. It is a two-hour-twenty-minute deep dive into the conservative heartland, where teachers spend valuable class time lecturing about the local football legacy, pigs are spray-painted before being sent to slaughter, folks hang out in the local greasy spoon and the gun shop, and the city council worries about possible expansion to a dodgy suburb known as Homestead, described in coded, dogwhistle lingo that makes it clear that it's low-income and probably predominantly black.

On a formal level, the most interesting aspects of Monrovia are the interstitial shots of the landscape -- corn fields, farmers at work, or beautifully framed, almost FSA-esque shots of the small town. But even these moments are somewhat unsatisfying, since Wiseman never lets us appreciate them for very long. (A great deal of Monvoria is like watching a James Benning film on high speed.)

One knows that there are African-Americans in rural Indiana, and occasionally they pop up in the background. But Wiseman studiously avoids them, or any environment or locale that would dispel the general impression that this is white Republican country. So one is left to wonder. After so many films about cultural institutions -- the ballet, the library, even the Crazy Horse burlesque -- did Wiseman feel some obligation to make his "Trump film"? At times Monrovia feels like one of those umpteen New York Times articles about what Trump voters are thinking and feeling, the Paper of Record's overcompensation against charges of urban elitism. Is this film Wiseman's lefty penance for the Jackson Heights movie? Red meat for the centrist set?

And of course, the ambivalence is thrown back on the viewer. If I find Monrovia, Indiana too unenlightening or monotonous, Wiseman and others can just as easily turn this around on me and call me the elitist, claiming that I don't care about the intricacies of lives in "flyover country." It's a perfect Catch-22. Wiseman finds homogeneity because he seems to expect it, and the film reflects that confirmation bias. But a critic who bemoans this problem in the final product can be said to be exposing biases of his or her own. I've occasionally had my issues with Wiseman's filmmaking (cf. At Berkeley), but this is the first time I've come away feeling less informed, if not dumber, than I started.