Review: Monrovia, Indiana

Monrovia, Indiana finds legendarily rigorous documentarian Frederick Wiseman travelling to America’s heartland and taking the continually quickening pulse of the country’s white middle class. In many respects a perfect counterpoint to his 2015 documentary In Jackson Heights – a pre-Trump era look at a multicultural and economically diverse New York City neighbourhood – Monrovia, Indiana looks at the citizens of a titular town at a crossroads. Most of Wiseman’s latest is curiously apolitical in the ways that most American prefer not to discuss their personal proclivities in a public setting, but just as the film is set to be the director’s most curiously frustrating (but still invaluable) effort, the veteran director, producer, and editor builds towards a moment of rapt poignancy that suggests he shares many of the viewer’s potential criticisms of his latest work.

Like almost all of Wiseman’s previous films, there’s no plot or throughline to speak of in Monrovia, Indiana. Set predominantly in the spring and summer of 2017, Wiseman takes a look at a town in Indiana’s Monroe County and the people that live and work within the largely agrarian community. Bouncing around between various businesses, social gatherings, and community organizations that keep things moving along in Monrovia, Indiana, Wiseman once again stitches together slices of life that will amount to an in-depth examination of both the complexity and simplicity of humanity. Like most of his recent output, Wiseman’s latest isn’t looking at any of the particularly intense working environments or overly dramatic life of death struggles that he might’ve earlier in his career, but that doesn’t make his late period films any less captivating. Wiseman’s films don’t tend to grow shorter in length (although, at almost two and a half hours, this is a mid-range effort from him), but the focus has been placed more stringently on individuals and their place within greater social structures.

Wiseman bounces around between the local high school, hogpens, town council assemblies, meetings of the local chapters of the Masons and the Lions, baby showers, funerals, greasy spoons, pizza joints, tattoo parlors, farm equipment auctions, the town fair, the veterinarian’s office, and even with a persnickety guy who’s having trouble settling on a new mattress that fits his needs. Some of these moments and conversations drag on for minutes, and some are as fleeting as a snapshot. Some of these moments allow the viewer to indulge in the culture of the town, and others are meant to enlighten and foster greater senses of understanding, concern, and empathy whenever necessary. To paraphrase Sesame Street, these are the people in the neighbourhood; the people that you meet each day. Wiseman presents all of them as exceptional and impassioned in their own ways, and all of them as a part of something greater, whether they realize it or not.

For the majority of Monrovia, Indiana, Wiseman employs his laissez faire approach to show people being themselves and doing the jobs and roles they’ve been trained and conditioned to perform for most of their lives, and as such the film says curiously little about spending time in what appears to be a relatively conservative, predominantly Christian, and overwhelmingly white middle American community today. Not much is made in casual conversation about the state of the union or the divisiveness rampant therein, even during a trip to a local gun shop where people would rather talk about sports and antiquated forms of ammunition. It’s all rather quaint and welcoming, but probably because the community feels largely insulated from the problems of bigger cities and townships.

One has to work fairly hard to find any sort of conflict within Monrovia, Indiana, but it’s definitely present whenever Wiseman returns to the town council meetings. The drama is subtle, but present in every conversation about rising homesteading rates and an influx of new residents that Monrovia might not be able to handle if growth continues at the same rate of speed. That’s a common problem faced by cities and towns all over the world today, but there’s an unspoken subtext within these everyday conversations that’s never breaking through. Concerns about crime rates and burdens on the community suggest that a lot of the town’s new residents are younger and living below or around the poverty line. Wiseman never looks at these new residents at all, which is a rare missed opportunity from a normally astute filmmaker. Larger conversations and arguments about, of all things, ineffective and aging fire hydrants speaks to other issues about corporate interests doing business within the community, exiting for a variety of reasons, and leaving citizens and lawmakers confused about how they should proceed. These concerns are present in some of the other footage Wiseman employs throughout Monrovia, Indiana and are more prevalent than any sort of overarching political discussions. It says a lot about the town, but little about the world outside of it.

The film is propped up greatly through Wiseman’s skills as a masterful editor and the visual eye of cinematographer and frequent collaborator John Davey. Wiseman says all he seemingly wants to about the current American political climate by watching a bunch of families browsing aisles upon aisles of pro-gun, pro-Trump, anti-Obama truck decals at the town fair, which is a simple and powerful, albeit obvious, visual. Davey and Wiseman are most successful, however, at visually depicting the enormous gap between the town’s young people and the upper middle aged and senior citizens tasked with running the community.

Outside of the aforementioned baby shower and a handful of brief sequences, it doesn’t look like many folks in their twenties and thirties are sticking around Monrovia if they can at all help it. Those who do stick around after high school look like they’re scraping by in menial service industry jobs or have returned from military service for a break. In the film’s best visual moment, a teenager squirms and fidgets while one of her teachers describes in punishing detail the town’s not-all-that-exceptional history as a “hotbed” for college basketball stars. It’s not that the town leaders are out of touch when they don’t bring up younger generations, but rather that there’s a knowing sense that none of them are going to stick around very long, so it’s pointless to bother with their concerns. These threads are picked up mostly through Wiseman’s keen powers of observation, and his ability to construct such narratives without spoon feeding them to the audience.

Those cultural and generational disconnects happen in most small towns around the world, and setting those aside, Monrovia, Indiana largely depicts American life at its level best. Wiseman never stops the show to address the growing political discomfort within the United States, which becomes a bit of a two way sword. It would be out of character if he addressed it overtly, but it’s also something too large to ignore. Thankfully, Wiseman closes out Monrovia, Indiana with two carefully constructed bits of cultural commentary that arrive almost back to back. One displays how confidence and a cheerful disposition can make any outlandish claims seem true. The other is decidedly blunter and more obvious, potentially acting as a preemptive cap on the aging documentarian’s career as a filmmaker. Monrovia, Indiana has retained a lot of its aged population because it seems like it would be a great place to live and die with a minimal amount of stress. The film’s personally and politically loaded parting shot might not be enough to make up with the wishy-washy nature of everything that came before it, but it definitely places Monrovia, Indiana – both the film and the town – into stark context for both the filmmaker and the rest of the nation around it.

Monrovia, Indiana screens at The Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto on Saturday, October 27, Monday, October 29, and Tuesday, October, 30, 2018.

Check out the trailer for Monrovia, Indiana: