SEPARATED Review: The Past Is Prologue on US Immigration Policy

In the first half of the first Trump administration, several thousand children were forcibly separated from their parents in a ‘zero-tolerance’ deterrence policy that was cynically designed to discourage Latin American migrants from seeking entry into the United States of America as refugees.

Some of these children were infants. Others were kept in what amounted to cages with concrete floors. Bborder guards were caught grimly making fun of the ‘symphony of misery’ of dozens of children crying out for their parents, while locked up in a foreign country. This was (and is) one of the lowest points of American decency in the 21st century. 



Many years earlier, during the second Gulf War, a number of soldiers took smiling, thumbs-up photos with tortured detainees in stress positions or completely naked (or dead). The most thoughtful take on why and how these atrocities would happen with such banal glee came from author, detective, and filmmaker Errol Morris. In the form of a book, and of course a film, Standard Operating Procedure came from a narrative angle that felt more a meditation of the nature of photography -- how we treat the medium now that everyone has a camera in their pocket was juxtaposed with a spiralling out of control military tradecraft in a foreign land. 



Morris now puts his camera and interviewing prowess towards the subject of child separation at the border. Only here, in Separated, the takeaway feels less like a philosophical post-mortem, and more like an ominous harbinger. This film is a dramatic warning. Or, what Shakespeare proclaimed in The Tempest: “The past is prologue.”
 

Using every ounce of the considerable craft he has developed in his nearly five decades of filmmaking, he is highly cognizant that narrative and storytelling is perhaps the only way to untangle the Gordian Knot of history and bureaucracy. Like The Bard, the story he tells, “an un-American tragedy” involving the spectrum of human attributes: ambitious political operators who sell their souls for careerism, goonish thugs that seem to delight in the cruelty of policy, villainous masterminds who whisper into the ears of kings, hapless yes-man stooges, and a few honourable men and women who, though under-resourced and unpopular, attempt to hold back the tide threatening to wash away the powerless and the helpless. 



Morris also takes the phrase, often misattributed to Josef Stalin, “The death of one is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” He stages the talking heads portions, filmed in an open studio space, crisply lit, with almost black and white geometric shapes comprising the background to well-dressed and well-educated Americans, and contrasts that with often highly saturated, low-depth of field and oblique camera angled re-enactments of a Guatemalan mother and her pre-teen son, Diego, migrating from their home to the border.

 

They are eventually, captured and separated by a weaponized, coldly cruel, American immigration policy enforcement, of which the documentary film is trying to parse at the political and media level. Also in the re-enactments, there are often walls, bars, wires, cages, and other obfuscating obstacles in the blocking parts of the frame. A curious (perhaps too abstract here) use of the old zoetrope toy -- a precursor persistence of vision illusion technology which is the key to how cinema works -- acts to underscore grim dramatic moments while bridging both the talking heads audio and re-enactment halves.



The hero (or at the very least, MVP) of the story is a mid-level bureaucrat working for the Office of Refugee resettlement, Captain Jonathan White. Upon noticing the uptick of activity in his office, and the younger and younger children put into the resettlement program without their parents, he  attempts to use everything within his power, meaning setting up meetings, and sending emails (which Morris and his graphics department have a extraordinary gift for making visually dynamic).

 

Along with an NBC journalist, Jacob Soboroff, who is author of the book Separated: Inside An American Tragedy (here adapted into documentary form), Morris attempts to shed sunlight on a shadowy machiavellian gambit that is extraordinary in its cruelty. Choices are made by people in power, which are not accidents of a complex bureaucracy, adding considerably to the quotient of human misery under the guise of ‘Making America Great Again.’

Do you remember that scene in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the guerrilla repairman played by Robert DeNiro is slowly asphyxiated in the street by random blowing paperwork? One purpose of Separated (and for that matter, much of Errol Morris’ oeuvre of political documentaries) is to prevent that dystopian, and bleakly tragicomic, death from happening. 
 

I generally take a great amount of pleasure in Morris’s more whimsically inquisitive uses of his skillset: the place and character driven look at pet cemeteries, Gates of Heaven, the bonkers web of love and left-field surprises in Tabloid, the calm and warm domesticity of life-sized polaroids in The B-Side or the recent cheeky cynicism of spy craft in John LeCarre’s worldview in The Pigeon Tunnel. But there is zero doubt that he can construct a righteous political barn burner, a call to attention, a ‘lest we forget’ tract in the spirit of human decency.

 

Watching former ICE director Tom Homan back in the news cycle as President-elect Donald Trump’s ‘Border Czar’ appointment, Separated is a warning beacon that arrives, just in time, to meet the moment. Roger Ebert, a long time friend and supporter of Errol Morris' work, often would refer to cinema as 'an empathy machine.' If the empathy machine has to be weaponized here to combat the weaponization of cruel police, so be it.