Justin here with a look at the documentary , which premiers at this years' Starz Denver Film Festival.
Patriocracy is Denver-based director-producer Brian Malone's new movie about how divisive media coverage affects our view of politics. The movie starts around the same time that President Obama was inaugurated and continues through the stomach-churning absurdity that was last summer’s debt ceiling debacle. Large segments of the movie focus on the absurd town hall debates that surrounded the passage of health care reform and the birth of the Tea Party. However, Malone smartly avoids turning the film into a polemic against the right. Instead, Malone places a fair amount of blame on the Democrats as well. The movie doesn’t stop there though; by the end, he offers a wide variety of solutions to help America get back to a more productive discourse.
In the interest of disclosure, I’ll say that I’m very liberal. I usually vote Democratic. I am, however, registered as an Independent and don’t plan on affiliating myself with any party anytime soon. I listen to NPR every day on my commute, but sometimes I listen to conservative talk radio when I’m running errands in the middle of the day. I don’t know why… it usually makes me extremely angry. I’m a political news junkie. I read various biased and less-biased news websites all day. I really like Rachel Maddow and watch her show most nights. I don’t like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz and to a lesser extent, Lawrence O’Donnell. And like most people my age, I think the best political and media commentary happening now comes from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think this movie had any strong political bias one way or the other. Sometimes (and this may just be my own political biases talking) I think this may have hurt the narrative. Certain topics were not discussed that I think have greatly contributed to the current state of our political dysfunction. Take, for example, the Republicans’ insistent strategy that every piece of legislation that might make Obama and the Democrats look good gets filibustered. However, that’s a minor complaint, and not even the real focus of the movie. I’ll admit that by not placing the blame solely on one party, Malone is able to explore the deeper issues.
The first and most obvious is the role that biased media coverage plays in influencing people’s decisions. Relatively equal time is given to Fox News and MSNBC. The most interesting segment focused on a side-by side comparison of Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann’s coverage on the same day of the new congress being sworn in last year. Malone also points out that viewers of these shows are complacent as well, not searching out the facts on their own, and taking opinion shows as gospel as opposed to entertainment.
Patriocracy explores other topics as well, such as the reprehensible Citizens United Supreme Court decision which has allowed corporations to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, by essentially giving them the same rights as individual people. This money is most often used to flood the airwaves with misleading attack ads, with no approval or control by any candidate.
To Malone’s great credit, lots of screen time is given to both Democrats and Conservatives. Again, maybe this is my own bias coming through, but I was shocked to see Pat Buchanan making a lot of sense and saying things that I actually agree with. Of course, he stayed off the fundamentalist agenda…
The movie itself is very well put together. It’s slick, but not distractingly so. The narrative moves at a brisk pace and manages to keep interest high, a great feat for a serious political documentary. The movie never resorts to sensationalism.
Political documentaries are tricky. This is one of the rare ones that could actually make a difference because it can be watched by both Democrats and Republicans without the knee-jerk reaction that a Michael Moore or Tea Party movie would have. In that sense, this is a great movie for the holidays when we’re forced to be around people who invariably have different political views than us, our families. Rather than another irritating conversation about Obamacare or racist Tea Partiers, put this movie on instead, and talk about how we need to move forward. Recommended.
Patriocracy plays at SDFF Sat, November 5th at 6:00 pm and Thursday, November 10th at 6:00 pm. You can buy tickets here.