(The Toronto International Film Festival (or TIFF) runs September 10-20 and HtN has boots on the ground covering all the best indie films they have to offer. Check out Brandon Wilson’s Union Town movie review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
In the not too distant past, 80 was the end of the road for American filmmakers. Some of our most lauded and esteemed were prematurely enshrined in tombs of high regard. Their efforts to make a new film were met with a wall of praise for their earlier efforts, spoken with such volume and frequency that at times it felt like backhanded praise; it was the industry’s way to say that though they still had films to get out of their system, they had been retired against their will. For decades, George Cukor had the distinction of being the lone American filmmaker to make a film as an octogenarian and the industry seemed determined to keep that an outlier rather than a norm.
But naturally, this was yet another precedent destined to buckle under the irresistible force of the Baby Boomers. Finally, America is joining the rest of the world in welcoming and valuing the voices of filmmaking elders.
Two time Academy Award winning documentarian Barbara Kopple is the latest filmmaker to break the octogenarian barrier with her hotly awaited new documentary. Though her career is pretty diverse and storied, the work Kopple will be forever associated with turned 50 this year, her Academy Award winning feature documentary Harlan County, U.S.A.. That film told the story of a coal miners’ strike in Kentucky, and Kopple embedded herself in coal country to make the film which took years to complete.
Her next feature film came 14 years later with American Dream, which also won Kopple the Oscar. This film told the story of the Hormel food workers strike of the mid-80s, but unlike her first film set in coal country, American Dream details a strike collapsing due to the external pressures of the unionbusting Reagan era and internal disunity within the union which becomes as bitter as the conflict with management.
Kopple’s latest film Union Town forms a trilogy with the earlier two films which will define the filmmaker’s career. And while this story stands on its own as the first of her labor tableaux to take on the complexities of labor activism in the 21st century, it dialogues with the other films in interesting ways. Harlan County, U.S.A. seemed timeless in that it focused on a line of work that went back to the dawn of the Machine Age itself. Similarly, the strike in American Dream focused on a company many had a decades long relationship with, and the film deftly explores how the old image of the company as a community’s paterfamilias was giving way to a new cold corporate bureaucracy.
And now Union Town completes the arc by focusing on delivery workers. There are three fronts in this battle: UPS, Amazon, and food delivery apps. Beginning during the Biden Presidency, Kopple focuses on workers in the New York area. As is her style, she lets the workers speak for themselves. Even back when narration was a more accepted part of non-fiction cinematic storytelling, Kopple stayed true to her cinéma vérité roots, which meant eschewing expository narration. That tendency has kept Kopple’s work fresh and vital. The symphony of voices in her work makes a powerful point that while the class struggle is seemingly eternal, many nuances of that struggle today are very different from when Kopple began. But her work (particularly American Dream which detailed how workers would ultimately not share in the record company profits their labor creates) goes a long way to explaining how we got here.
Labor activists are almost always compelling subjects for non-fiction. They are passionate, usually good communicators, and do not shy away from conflict. The film shows the commonalities and differences between three groups: the UPS workers are older, used to union protection, and share an institutional memory of the company’s broken promises. The Amazon workers are struggling just to get union protection from a company that has created an employment purgatory for them in which they are and yet aren’t Amazon employees so that Jeff Bezos can remain among the world’s wealthiest people. And the deliveristas often fare the worst, having no history of union protection to call on in a job that places them in physical jeopardy from thieves and distracted drivers. Many of the deliveristas are also immigrants. Even before the depravity of ICE raids (Trump’s re-election and the dispiriting level of support he enjoyed amongst the union rank and file is touched on in the film’s second half), their stories are heartbreaking as the dream they had for a better life is dashed as they find themselves on the hamster wheel of predatory employment.
The film is at its most effective when it gives a voice to regular people and their epic struggles that would otherwise happen in anonymity. Kopple also shrewdly zeroes in on how these unions handle dissent within their own ranks. UPS workers in particular are impacted by the part-time-ification of their work force and the competing agendas that creates between the full timers and the part timers make for the film’s most volatile scenes.
Union Town does a beautiful job at both exploring what the labor fight looks like for some of the most vulnerable workers in America today, while also rounding out a trilogy that tells the story of American Labor over the last century. There are no easy victories here, but the film’s tone remains hopeful, rather than resigned. Kopple has chosen to paint on a broader canvas than ever before, and the result may not net her a third Oscar, but it will be a useful record of how the battle between labor and capital changed in the Age of the App.
– Brandon D. Wilson (@GeniusBastard)
