The cruelty is the point.
We’ve heard that sentence a lot over the past eight years. At no time was it ever more blisteringly accurate than during the family-separation policy the Trump administration enacted within days of taking office in January 2017. Watching Errol Morris‘s urgent reminder of a documentary — possibly the most enraging film yet made by a director who’s certainly known how to illuminate infuriating topics over the past 45 years — will raise your blood pressure considerably. Especially on one point that “Separated,” produced by NBC News, implies, but never underlines: How is it that we forgot about this shocking inhumanity so quickly?
How is it that — following the 2020 election at least — there weren’t congressional hearings, the appointment of a special prosecutor, and charges filed, related to the policy? It ostensibly ended in the summer of 2018 after massive public outcry, but over 1,000 children remain in U.S. custody, still un-reunited with their parents. That is an abandonment of governance almost as damning of the Biden administration as of the Trump administration that actually carried out the policy.
Morris recognizes an essential truth from the start: Much of the American public, and certainly the U.S. government, seems to have “moved on” from this injustice, turning their attention to the parade of crises that have occurred since. It’s necessary then for a total refresher. He starts “Separated,” based on NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff’s book of the same name, from the very beginning: how the policy came to be, who was steering it, and how it affected thousands of children, ripped from their parents’ arms as the families were caught illegally entering the U.S. at its southern border. The idea was to deter the waves of migrants fleeing Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, countries consumed with gang violence: Come to the U.S. illegally, and you may never see your children again. And they may end up in cages.
Soboroff admits near the start of the film that he didn’t really have a background in “source-based reporting” before writing his 2020 book — at least not the in-depth investigational kind he ultimately delivered. He can still be seen hosting segments on the “Today” show or anchoring “Weekend Today,” and it really is remarkable how well he balances the “start your morning right!” infotainment demands of those shows with the serious journalism of his book (and ongoing segments from the border in the years leading up to it). He’s a ready-made subject for Morris in his own right: Looking like a kind of 21st-century Harold Lloyd, Soboroff is certainly telegenic. But the incredible thing about “Separated” is that he also knows when to get out of the way. He’s been the leading journalist in the country to keep beating the drum about this awful story, but he knows it’s not about him. And his “talking head” time is appropriately limited.
Instead, Morris dramatizes the kind of dangers that so many migrants face when fleeing Central America. Working not with reenactments as much as poetic narrative composites of what any number of migrants might experience on their journey, Morris focuses on a young mother (Gabriela Cartol) and her son (Diego Armando Lara Lagunes) as they pack the belongings they want to take with them, then set out on foot over rough terrain. They sneak aboard a freight train to carry them north. The boy almost drowns when they swim across a river. And finally, they’re apprehended by ICE agents after they’ve crossed the U.S. border. Then, they’re separated.
These scenes, filmed in Mexico and with “Roma” and “Bardo” production designer Eugenio Caballero providing an immersive level of lived-in detail, are a direct conduit to emotion. It’s impossible not to empathize with what they’re going through, and marvel at their hope, misplaced though it may be, of what America could provide. It’s a stark contrast to the parallel narrative of how the family separation policy got off the ground, how U.S. agencies had their mission twisted so that they became tools of fear. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which always had been in charge of unaccompanied children sent to the border (often in hopes of them meeting up with a family member already in the U.S.), instead took the lead on taking children away from their parents when they were already accompanying them. It was a complete reversal of the ORR’s mission. And all to send two messages: Don’t come here. And to the American people: Look how tough we are.
The head of the ORR who carried out this policy, Scott Lloyd, is interviewed on-camera by Morris and comes across like a dullard. But Morris spends significant time showing how such a dehumanizing policy came about: By imagining emails, all in the public record and an FOIA request away, being written by Lloyd and others as they’re trying to formulate this policy. These are antiseptic animated recreations totally at odds with the urgent humanity of the mother-son journey Morris has dramatized. The emails bear a tone of office-like formality, with the distinct impersonality of corporate-speak. It’s all about the senders and recipients “getting aligned” on the policy and issuing “quick clarifications” and correcting misunderstandings in a way where no one person bears responsibility for everything. It’s human suffering masked with red tape, and indifference so profound that the separated kids being reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet is even still too much. One accusation against Lloyd in the film alleges he suggested not even keeping those spreadsheets of the kids, thus possibly deliberately losing track of what kids belong to what parents, at all. (Lloyd has long since denied that claim.)
Then there’s the soul-obliterating audio of the kids in cages crying and a heartless guard mocking them by saying, “Well, we have an orchestra here! What’s missing is a conductor.” Like many other moments in “Separated,” this had existed before. Morris’s mission here, like Soboroff’s in his book, is simply to capture these moments in a format where we won’t just forget about them when the next crisis dominates the news cycle. A feature film has a staying power, an ability to lodge itself in your brain, that the endless churn of 24/7 cable news simply never will. All that coverage on MSNBC or “NBC Nightly News” in 2018 was a first draft of history. A feature documentary is the more polished, peer-reviewed draft, the one that won’t just be buried under a succession of first drafts of other stories.
With its punchy 93-minute running time, “Separated” seems calculated on Morris’s part to break through in an attention economy where attention spans keep getting shorter and shorter and outrage about one thing only lasts until there’s the next thing to be outraged about. There’s probably a deeper version of this movie that could have been made, one that really addresses the life cycle of the public’s empathy. One that even holds a critical lens up to, say, MSNBC, which has offered airtime to ex-Trump officials such as Olivia Troye and Stephanie Grisham, now apparently on the right side of history because they’ve spoken out against the former president. But when kids were in cages, they did not resign their posts.
That’s not what “Separated” is. And maybe that would be asking too much. When Trump held up his squiggle signature and ended the separation policy in July 2018, that was the end of it for many. Morris and Soboroff remind us very clearly of what it would take to bring the policy back: simply another stroke of that pen.
Grade: B+
“Separated” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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