Movie Review: 11/8/16

11/8/16 ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Duane Andersen & Don Argott & Yung Chang & Garth Donovan & Petra Epperlein & Vikram Gandhi & Raul Gasteazoro & J. Gonçalves & Andrew Grace & Alma Har'el & Sheena M. Joyce & Daniel Junge & Alison Klayman & Ciara Lacy & Martha Shane & Elaine McMillion Sheldon & Bassam Tariq & Michael Tucker.

 

I assume the filmmakers behind the new documentary 11/8/16 thought that the film they were making was going to turn off differently – just like practically everyone else in the world did. The premise of the film is that a group of filmmakers follow various people, from different parts of America, in different walks of life, on Election Day 2016. There are Hillary supporters and Trump supporters – even an Evan McMullen supporter, and one guy in Hawaii who doesn’t even seem to know an election is going on (to be fair to him, he is a convicted felon, who spent the last 20 years in jail – so he couldn’t vote even if he wanted to). When the film begins, almost everyone – even those who are Trump people – admit they think Hillary is probably going to win. What happens for the rest of the documentary will either be joyous schadenfreude for Trump supporters, or a slow motion horror film for everyone else.

 

The filmmakers seem to deliberately trying to avoid the extremes on either the left or the right in the documentary. There are a few New York artists who believe that the whole system is corrupt, and so being involved in it in any way makes you corrupt – but they’re not exactly Bernie Bros shouting about rigged elections. On the right the film does have a couple in Massachusetts argue about Trump’s suitably for office – even as they both vote for him, her more reluctantly than him – and a family of a coal miner in Virginia, neither family seems like the type who would change their twitter handle to proudly state that they are “Deplorables”. Their comments rise to the level of perhaps, vaguely racist – but with enough wiggle room to leave doubt.

 

I understand why the filmmakers decided this – I don’t think they wanted this documentary to become another polemic – another instance of people screaming at each other, and not listening to what others have to say. Their goal was clearly to make a film in which no matter what your affiliation, you could sit down and watch – and maybe come away with some understanding of why people voted the way they did. But if the 2016 election was about anything, it was about those extremes, and pretending they don’t exist – as this documentary does – leaves an incomplete portrait of what that day – and that election was like. We know why, say, a coal miner would vote for Trump – you can be against coal, and think we need to move away from it, and understand that.

 

The result is a film that basically skims the surface of the 2016 election, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure what the overall value to that is. The film is never less than engaging – no matter your political beliefs, you will probably find some people here you immediately relate to, and others you immediately despise, etc. – and it is somewhat interesting to see the slow dawning realization that Trump could actually win, and then he actually did from the outside – rather than the inside as we all experienced it a year ago. But the film feels somewhat incomplete and cursory. It’s too civil to be a documentary about 2016 – not because the film necessarily needs to take sides, but it needs to show that discord that it actively avoids.