[DETROPIA
opens in Cleveland on Friday October 19th exclusively at the Cedar
Lee Theatre.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
Two of the best documentaries in recent
years, THE SKY TURNS and
SLEEP FURIOUSLY,
were poetic observations of small towns fading into oblivion. Heidi
Ewing and Rachael Grady's DETROPIA
comes close to doing the same thing for the American metropolis of
Detroit. Once the fastest growing city in the U.S., it is at the time
of this documentary's filming the fastest shrinking. Once a bustling
manufacturing town, Detroit is now a landscape of vacant factories
and homes. Yet for a
film about a city in decay, DETROPIA
is at times hauntingly beautiful. It's also, for all its emphasis on
aesthetics, a very human film.
DETROPIA
doesn't try to create some contrived narrative arc; it simply shows
us various Detroit residents sharing their stories as they try to hang on. Video blogger/urban explorer Crystal
Starr documents some of the city's once beautiful structures before
they get torn down; Union president George McGreggor tries vainly to
prevent the last American Axle plant actually located in America from
moving to Mexico; retired school teacher turned bar
owner Tommy Stephens does his best to stay optimistic that the jobs,
and his customers, will come back; the show must go on at the Detroit Opera House despite the looming threat of losing its funding if the big 3
automakers go under.
Young
artist types are about the only new residents moving to the city,
brought there by the availability of cheap loft space. There's only
so much call for Bohos taking photos of themselves wearing gold gas
masks, though. Meanwhile the mayor weighs the pros and cons of
“rightsizing” the city by relocating residents and reclaiming
land for urban farming. Offering an ironic counterpoint to all of
this is old footage of Detroits imagined Utopian future produced by
the car companies.
It's
no spoiler to say that a ray of light finally shines through with the
auto company bailout, which restores some of the lost manufacturing
jobs. Whether the resurgence will hold in the long term remains to be
seen. Stephens discusses the much cheaper Chinese-made alternatives
to the Chevy Volt with representatives of the Detroit companies who
dismiss them as junk. As Stephens reminds them, that's what they used
to say about Honda.
With so many documentaries
these days consisting of some smart ass filmmaker inserting
him or herself directly into the film, or else yet another tired parade
of talking heads sitting in chairs intercut with stock footage, it's
nice to see a documentary where the filmmakers actually went out into
the world and captured it on film first hand. Ewing and
Grady allow their subjects and images to speak for themselves
without too much artifice or commentary, but they do manage to subtly get across their views about the problems Detroit faces, and how that applies to the country as a whole. 4 out of 4 stars.
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