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Waverly Welfare Center, "the New York runaround," nerve center of a broken system. Social workers and applicants in a windowless office, a procession of interactions. Faces of poverty, doleful, angry, desperate, often fresh out of hospitals or prisons. They plead their cases, money for food and rent. "Aw man, you're giving me technicality, I'm telling you about a condition!" A couple, married but not to each other, the indigenous runaway from a reservation "like a concentration camp," a recovering junkie with his tale of roommates and girlfriends and dogs, "it gets more involved as we go along." Address changes, notarized letters, pay stubs, "papers, papers, papers" like Shelley's "stones, stones, stones, nothing but stones." Staff members meet plight as well as they can, "they're understaffed, et cetera, et cetera." Frederick Wiseman's magisterial snapshot of Dantean bureaucracy, lucidly bitter, patiently overwhelming. A former sergeant in close-up spews racist rhetoric to someone off-screen, the camera pulls back to reveal a Black security guard calmly parrying the bigot's litany. Circular arguments, departments on different floors, "a catastrophe for any poor slob seeking assistance." Hubbub, telephones and typewriters and crying babies, the whirring of computers printing the almighty check. Beckett is mentioned, so is Geraldo Rivera. People exchange grievances in the waiting room, distribute and absorb irritation, display empty purses to overworked eyes. The watchful janitor, as distinctive a Wiseman figure as Manet's ragpicker. An ode to America and God in the immigrant's voice, cf. Lumet's 12 Angry Men. From diatribe to prayer with the destitute teacher forced to steal chocolate bars, practically an Off-Broadway playlet, the moon-faced woman next to him squirms in her chair. "Did I say it was right? I said it was necessary!" A consummate record from a filmmaker who, as Orwell would have it, understands the constant struggle to see what's in front of your nose. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |