Review: The Alabama Solution
Roger Ebert was right
In a speech marking the dedication of a plaque with his name on it outside the Chicago Theatre, Roger Ebert said one of the truest things I’ve ever read about film:
We are all born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We are kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people, find out what makes them tick, what they care about. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.
In a century and change, film has evolved as a medium into a powerful tool (the most effective one, in my view) for placing you into the shoes of a stripper from Brooklyn, a FedEx employee stranded on an island, or a helpless camp counselor. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that as viewing habits (and content designed to meet those habits) steer toward spectacle, pre-sold IP, brand awareness, “world-building.” Lord knows I’ve contributed to it with my constant celebration of empty-calorie genre material. I still believe that genre and spectacle have their place in a healthy diet! But at bottom, I think that the core competitive advantage film has over other media is its ability, at its best, to compel a viewer to absorb the story of another, and to stand in their shoes for two hours.
Photo from IMDb
I was reminded of that truth last Friday night by The Alabama Solution, screened at the DC/DOX film festival. This remarkable documentary by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman tells a difficult story of several men contending with violence and corruption inside the Alabama state prison system as they pressure the state to reform its treatment of them, and its handling of prisons generally. There are two stories at play: one revolves around an inmate, Steven Davis, who died after guards beat him severely, and Davis’s family’s search for answers and accountability. The other narrative thread focuses on prisoner-activists Robert Earl Council, a.k.a. Kinetik Justice, and Melvin Ray, who seek to improve conditions behind bars through a combination of pro se litigation, labor strikes, and publicity campaigns.
Council’s and Ray’s story is about plodding resilience and innovation as they live in, and wrestle with, this brutally violent system. And as we follow Davis’s family, chiefly his mother, we see the obstacles she confronts just to learn the truth about what happened to her son.
It’s a difficult film to watch; Jarecki and Kaufman do not spare the viewer from visual evidence of prison conditions that led to a 2020 civil rights lawsuit by the Department of Justice. At one point, the directors linger on a photograph of Davis’s face taken by his brother who visited him in the ICU after the beating and dare us to look away. It’s also probably overlong, especially for subject matter this challenging. That could be part of the point though; if two hours of this is overwhelming, imagine a thirty-year bid.
Much of the footage in Alabama Solution was shot by the inmates themselves on cell phones smuggled into the prison, providing a rare (unprecedented?) inside look at the medieval state of these places, unvarnished by prison PR bureaucrats. We see the food, the sleeping and outnumbered guards, the decrepit facilities, and the overdosing prisoners.
Jarecki and Kaufman interview prisoners via furtive video calls made from these forbidden phones. At the outset of many calls, we see the prisoners glancing around their area making sure they’re out of sight of guards, and sometimes instructing their interviewers not to speak, or to mute their phones so no sound comes through the phone on the prisoners’ side. The filmmakers show us their participation in sneaking these messages out to the broader world. Their presentation in the familiar format of a video call, and the decision not to edit around throat-clearing and pleasantries typical of any call, makes the calls with prisoners feel more intimate and relatable than a standard talking head in a documentary, or a narrower slice of a Skype interview. The net result is a participatory effect, where we’re the filmmakers’ and prisoners’ silent partners in secreting the story out of the prison’s walls and to the wider world.
Participation is an important element of the film. It’s a political film with a clear message, and I walked out of it mulling over the role we all play in the conditions portrayed in The Alabama Solution. One reviewer who caught the film at Sundance noted that it would likely play to people who are already clued in to challenges in prison systems, and I suspect that’s probably true. Many people sitting home on the couch won’t want to turn this on while they fold laundry on a Sunday afternoon. That’s a shame. I’m not trying to convince you of anything - this isn’t that kind of newsletter - aside from giving this film a shot. If you live in a community that imprisons people, maybe you should give a thought (or Alabama Solution’s two hour runtime) to how those prisons operate, what they are trying to accomplish, and the stories of people within those prisons. Alabama Solution is powerful testimony that it will be worth the effort.
I’m a lawyer, but not your lawyer. The views expressed above (“Views”) are not legal advice. Views are mine alone (and I don’t even know that I’ll stick to them, if pressed). Views should not be attributed to anybody else, including (but not limited to) my employer, employer’s clients, friends, family, or pets (current, former, or future).