C4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2020
FILM REVIEWSIn 2012, the terminally ill 17-year-
old Zach Sobiech learned he
wouldn’t live through the follow-
ing year. To grapple with his grief
and the pallor it cast over his first
serious relationship, Zach wrote a
love song called “Clouds” about
his girlfriend, about cancer and
about letting go. The ballad went
viral, inspiring a celeb-studded
lip-sync video including Jason
Mraz, Bryan Cranston and Sarah
Silverman, plus a visit from the
actor-turned-director Justin Bal-
doni, who flew to the Sobiech
home in Minnesota to interview
Zach and his family for the digitaldocu-series “My Last Days.”
After Zach’s death, “Clouds” hit
No. 1 on the iTunes singles charts.
As an encore, Baldoni has di-
rected a folksy feature by the
same name, streaming on Dis-
ney+, which presents Zach as a
beatific teenager who left too
soon. Played with goofball charmby Fin Argus, Zach opens the film
flaunting his bald head and gyrat-
ing pelvis for the class talent
show while belting “Sexy and I
Know It.”
Big on hugs and scant on plot,
the gentle, hazy script (by Kara
Holden) is jolted by dramatic
moments, like Zach bathing in thehealing waters of Lourdes,
France, and a seemingly self-
destructive incident behind the
wheel, which is quickly ushered
away unresolved as if to shrug,
that’s life.
“My Last Days” also inspired
Baldoni’s first feature, the signifi-
cantly profitable 2019 romance
“Five Feet Apart” about a young
couple with cystic fibrosis. The
uncharitable reading is the direc-
tor is aware that tragedies forge a
sturdy shield against nitpicks
about, say, the meandering pace.
Better to be generous until it’s
clear he intends a franchise.
Yet, while “Clouds” is as doe-
eyed and puppyish as an acoustic
serenade, Baldoni is wise to rec-
ognize that attention must be paid
to Zach’s survivors, who include
his parents (Neve Campbell and
Tom Everett Scott); his girlfriend
(Madison Iseman); and his best
friend and bandmate, played by
the vibrant Sabrina Carpenter,
who’d hoped to eventually win
over her unrequited first love.
AMY NICHOLSONCLOUDS
Rated PG-13 for brief strong lan-
guage. Running time: 2 hours
1 minute. Watch on Disney+.. ...................................................................
Fin Argus and Sabrina Carpenter in “Clouds,” directed by Justin Baldoni.DISNEY+The New Orleans bounce music
queen Big Freedia is armed with
empathy. She doesn’t just talk
lucidly about how her life has
been irrevocably shaped by gun
violence in the documentary
“Freedia Got a Gun,” she does
something about it.
The film (streaming on Pea-
cock) wisely avoids biographical
documentary tropes, instead
functioning more like a call to
arms to address the gun violence
epidemic in New Orleans. Freedia
is forthright and unsentimental
about her experiences. Her
brother, Adam, was killed in 2018.
She discusses how the territorial
nature of the low-income housing
areas of the city would go on to
inform her music.
Freedia is self-aware enough to
know, however, how she can use
her platform, often stepping back
to center on those who have been
affected. While visiting correc-
tional facilities and the families of
victims, she gives space to those
affected, allowing them to speak.
Her hope is to work with one kid
at a time to ensure he avoids not
only being part of the prison
system but also experiencing the
traumas of violence facing Black
men in New Orleans. If the film
sometimes drifts into after-
school-special aesthetics, that can
be forgiven for the striking empa-
thy it has for its community mem-
bers.
When “Freedia Got a Gun”
risks being unrelenting in its pain,
the director Chris McKim leaves
room for levity. At one moment,
the film documents the recovery
of a young man paralyzed from
being hit by a stray bullet. His
mother recounts telling her son
he could get an iPhone if he
worked on regaining his speech
during his rehabilitation. She
makes a wily smile, deadpanning,
“Sam started talking.”
Freedia’s beguiling charismacarries the film, and it makes the
case that her impressive power, in
conjunction with collective action,
could help carry a movement, too.
KYLE TURNERFREEDIA GOT A GUN
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 28
minutes. Watch on Peacock.
. ...................................................................
tics and cultural tempo of the early aughts
themselves were now period-piece revival
material.
Premiering in 1999 after a run of relative
20th-century institutional stability, “The
West Wing” believed that the system
worked, even if the people in it could always
be better.
President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen)
was an aspirational Gallant to reality’s Goo-
fuses. In the late Bill Clinton era, he was a
fantasy of morally upstanding, unapologet-
ic liberalism. In the Bush years, he was a
fantasy of a proudly intellectual president.
Today — well, take your pick. Wanting bet-
ter leaders never goes out of style, but the
series’s reverent institutionalism now
seems much more remote.
“Hartsfield’s Landing” takes its title from
a subplot in which the aide Josh Lyman
(Bradley Whitford) frets over the results
from the first small town to vote in the New
Hampshire primary. It’s an odd story be-
cause Bartlet is running for renomination
essentially unopposed. But for a show en-
amored with retail democracy in all its ab-
surdity, it’s too much to resist. (One does
wonder, if the episode had been written in
2020, whether someone might at least note
the inordinate power that the quaint tradi-
tion gives a handful of white voters.)
This affection for civic ritual, in norms-
trampling Trumpian times, now seems star-
crossed and naïve. As the actor Samuel L.
Jackson put it during an act break, “Our
politics today are a far cry from the roman-
tic notion of ‘The West Wing.’ ” Even the
central metaphor of the episode, Bartlet’s
playing his advisers at chess, seems sadly
nostalgic in an era dominated by players
who prefer to kick over the board.
“The West Wing” was always a palliative
fantasy. The election arc eventually led
Bartlet to run against the Republican gover-
nor of Florida, Robert Ritchie (James
Brolin), a proud anti-intellectual who
shared political DNA with George W. Bush.
Bartlet decided to own his erudition rather
than run from it, sarcastically shredded his
opponent in a debate and won re-election in
a landslide.
Two years later, George W. Bush became
what is now the only Republican since his
father won in 1988 to earn a majority of the
popular vote.
Well, fantasy is part of what TV is for. And
fantasy can be a strong motivator: Argu-
ably, part of what fuels Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s
campaign against the Twitter president to-
day is the promise, however improbable, of
returning to a time of relative comity, rever-
ence and quiet.
But the show fed a lot of fantasies that
have smashed hard and ugly against reality.
“The West Wing” was smitten with the
power of words. But in the real world, there
is no speech so masterly that it stuns your
rivals into awed silence, no debate argu-
ment so irrefutable that your opponent
can’t just bark “Wrong!” over it a hundred
times.
It’s nice to think that going high always
beats going low, but we know now what
“The West Wing” learned as it steadily lost
audience to the likes of “The Bachelor.”
What works in scripted drama does not nec-
essarily fly in a reality-TV world.
Remixed by Reality
Connoisseurs of a different form of political
idealism got it in July when Disney+
streamed the filmed performance of Lin-
Manuel Miranda’s founding-father musical,
“Hamilton.”
If “The West Wing” was the progressive
pop-cultural fantasy of the Clinton-Bush
years, “Hamilton” was its Obama-era an-
swer. (Miranda previewed a snippet at a
White House poetry jam in 2009.) Its hip-
hop score and its pointed casting of actors of
color to play white dollar-bill figures em-
bodied an America resolved to expand its
political and cultural range of portraiture.
At its Broadway premiere in 2015, and
through the campaign of 2016, there was a
kind of triumphalism in the discourse
around it. America’s first Black president
was finishing his second term; his female
former secretary of state was, surely, about
to replace him. Inclusion had won.
There were still people outside the “Ham-
ilton” spirit, of course. But a candidate who
ran on building walls and demonizing immi-
grants — they get the job done! — would
surely fail. The day after the “Access Holly-
wood” tape came out in October 2016, Mi-
randa hosted “Saturday Night Live” and
sang Donald Trump’s epitaph with his own
lyrics: “He’s never gonna be president
now.”
But hubris was never really the spirit of
Miranda’s musical. Its music and casting
spoke backward in time to a country that
talked the talk of liberty and equality but
would take centuries to attempt to walk the
walk. It was a story of leaders compromis-
ing their ideals, of setback and backlash; of
planting seeds of hope that you would never
live to see grow.
It took the shock of 2016 — the world
turned upside down — to bring that aspect
of “Hamilton” to the fore. The film pre-miered on Disney+ the same Independence
Day weekend that the president gave a vi-
cious speech at Mount Rushmore that ac-
cused antiracism protesters of attacking
American history itself.
Watched in that moment, the musical
suddenly felt more defiant, combative and
urgent. (As it did after the 2016 election,
when the cast called out the vice president-
elect, Mike Pence, in the audience of a per-
formance.)
It was engaged in an argument, not in the
past but right now, over whose faces get
carved into stone and whom history be-
longs to. Fittingly for a show about under-
dogs, it was playing from the standpoint not
of the regime but of the rebellion.The “Hamilton” that came to Disney+
was the same one that played on Broadway
in June 2016, when the film was shot. And it
was entirely different. Not a single line had
changed. Reality provided the rewrite.A Celebration and a Requiem
Two more politically minded stage shows
airing on TV this weekend originated dur-
ing the current administration, yet they al-
ready find themselves reframed by current
events. Amazon’s “What the Constitution
Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s fact-filled
feminist lament of how women’s bodies
have been “left out of this document from
the beginning,” is more plangent and vivid
after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,who has an audio cameo in the show.
One of the season’s most stirring state-
ments comes from a concert movie. “David
Byrne’s American Utopia,” on HBO and
HBO Max starting Saturday, looks superfi-
cially like a sequel to the art-pop of “Stop
Making Sense,” the Jonathan Demme film
of Byrne’s heyday with Talking Heads.
(Even the natty gray outfits he and his band
wear recall his absurdist ’80s big suit.) And
the film, directed by Spike Lee, is kinetic,
visually playful fun.
But a message slips in elliptically, the
only way Byrne knows how to travel. He be-
gins alone onstage, serenading a model of a
brain. We’re born, he says, with more neural
connections than we end life with. Does that
make us dumber as we age, or better?
“Utopia” dances to the answer by skip-
ping through Byrne’s catalog, synthesizing
a worldview. He’s always had a fascination
with homes and houses (burning down the,
this is not my beautiful, etc.). Now he builds
those blocks into an argument: that a full
life means starting from your brain — your
first, hermetic home — and then building
connections with other people and inviting
them in.
This might be a cornball message coming
from someone other Byrne, who, as he de-
scribes himself, has always been skittish of
guests and gregariousness. (That big suit
looked like a kind of armor.) Nor has he been
politically didactic, preferring the approach
of Dadaists like Hugo Ball, who provided
the lyrics for “I Zimbra,” “using nonsense to
make sense of a world that didn’t make
sense.”
But time changes everyone. As “Ameri-
can Utopia” goes on, its politics become
more explicit, addressing voting and immi-
gration, building to Janelle Monáe’s racial-
justice anthem “Hell You Talmbout” —
which, Byrne adds self-consciously, he
called Monáe about to make sure she was
OK with having “a white man of a certain
age” perform it.
Finally, Byrne and company bike the
streets of Manhattan to the tune of his “Ev-
erybody’s Coming to My House.” It feels like
a light ending until you recall that the stage
production of “Utopia” closed in February,
just before the pandemic shut down Broad-
way and nobody was coming to anybody’s
house anymore.
Viewed today, the show’s quirky commu-
nitarianism — its idea of America as a poly-
morphous, all-welcoming dance party —
feels like both celebration and requiem for
the irreplaceable delight dancing together
on a stage. (In all these staged-film produc-
tions, the shut-in’s medium of TV is filling in
now for the community of Broadway and
the multiplex.)
But it also plays like a call to action. We’ve
had to close up our houses for now. We
might as well take advantage of the pause,
“American Utopia” says, to think about
what kind of home we want to live in once
we get to open up again.JAMES PONIEWOZIK CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKToday’s Anxieties
In Yesterday’s Lens
From above, Martin Sheen reprised his “West
Wing” role for a staged performance of a 2002
episode; David Byrne, foreground, in “David
Byrne’s American Utopia”; and Heidi Schreck
in “What the Constitution Means to Me.”EDDY CHEN/HBO MAX, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSJOAN MARCUS/AMAZON, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSHBO, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1