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September 4, 2024The ‘Fog of War’ and ‘Thin Blue Line’ filmmaker explores the origins and execution of the notorious border policy enacted by the Trump administration.
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If you go back to the earliest days of his career — Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida — Errol Morris’ great gift appeared to be giving voices to people on the margins of American society.
The prolific director’s fury is at a full boil in his NBC News documentary Separated, which is now getting a fall festival showcase. Examining the border policy of family separations, Morris rips into the xenophobes who stealthily crafted it, the unqualified bureaucrats who set it in motion and the paranoid climate that could allow it to resurface depending on how the November election goes.
What Separated needs, though, is a little touch of the old Errol Morris. The film replaces the voices of the actual people impacted by the family separation policy with generic composite characters who exist only in sterilized reenactments. It plays solidly to the head, but misses the heart and soul entirely.
Adapting the book by NBC News’ Jacob Soboroff, Morris is careful to emphasize that as much as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller might be the heavies of the piece, the general inhumanity of our border policy has existed for decades regardless of the party in power. Still, he’s equally careful to distinguish between the stumbling blocks imposed by previous (and subsequent) administrations and what was rolled out during the Trump presidency.
Morris builds his timeline and his case convincingly enough that you won’t fret that he’s a couple of years behind on the reporting for this particular story, previously chronicled in Soboroff’s 2020 book and multiple documentaries and docuseries.
Morris, frequently presented as an off-camera voice, calls the de-parented children “state-created orphans” and includes footage from David Lean’s Oliver Twist for good measure.
“Harm to the children was part of the point,” White laments, echoing claims by most of the career administrators who agreed to Morris’ typically impeccable Interrotron treatment.
To nobody’s surprise, Miller wouldn’t sit down for interviews. Nor would Trump or former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. They all look horrible here, but it’s hard to imagine them caring. (Elaine Duke, Nielsen’s predecessor in an “acting” capacity, is present mostly to confess that she was relieved she didn’t get the full-time gig.)