Midway through “Separated,” celebrated documentarian Errol Morris’ new film about the Trump Administration’s policy of splitting up parents and children attempting to enter the U.S. via the southern border, ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt makes a key point when he talks about his legal challenge to the policy. The strategy, Gelernt tells Morris, was to stay away from inflammatory words like abuse and torture, however accurate they may have been.
“This is the worst thing I have ever seen in the immigration field,” says Gelernt. “It was better to just tell the stories of those children and let the facts speak for themselves.”
The strategy worked in the courtroom, but Morris himself doesn’t make use of it in “Separated,” which had its world premiere on Thursday at the Venice International Film Festival.
To be sure, Morris tells the story of those children, of their parents and of the officials who were responsible for splitting up more than 5,000 families. But rather than letting the facts speak for themselves, the filmmaker responsible for “The Fog of War,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “American Dharma” and last year’s “The Pigeon Tunnel” devotes a surprising amount of his movie to embellishing those facts with a fictional story, less a reenactment than a drama that weaves in and out of the documentary.
At times, the artfully-shot footage of actors playing mother and child refugees on their journey from Central America to the United States is an effective way to stir the emotions and push an audience out of our comfortable roles as earnestly concerned documentary viewers. But at other times, and increasingly as the film goes on, it feels as if the filmmaker is trying to pump up the drama in a story that doesn’t need to be dramatized or pumped up. The subject matter is already horrifying; we hardly need to see its fictional illustration staged for maximum impact and set to insistent and foreboding music.
Still, “Separated” is characteristically thorough and eye-opening. Based on journalist Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 nonfiction book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” the film lays the groundwork with an opening audio montage of voiceovers that feature every president from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama talking about the United States’ problems with immigration. Then it shifts to the role of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which in the past had been tasked with taking care of the relatively small number of children who arrived at the border unaccompanied, or who had to be removed from parents who were incapable of caring for them.
But that’s all prologue, because the film is about the children who entered the country with their parents and were then taken away under a Trump Administration policy that the film suggests was spearheaded by White House advisor Stephen Miller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The goal, Soboroff explains, was deterrence: “Their version of stopping people from coming into the country was taking children away from their parents so they wouldn’t come.” The so-called “zero-tolerance policy” became a huge strain on the ORR, hijacking it for a purpose for which it was never intended. Former ORR Deputy Director Jonathan White says he argued that the policy would overwhelm the Border Patrol and the ORR. “They told me, ‘Only at first. Then it will be a deterrent,’” he says. “They said it would terrify people into not coming.”
Separation began in the summer of 2017 even while the government was claiming it wasn’t happening, and continued while officials tried to downplay or obscure what was really happening, or tried to say it was simply enforcing existing laws. Morris lays out that story carefully in characteristic fashion, with interview subjects speaking directly into the camera while archival footage and photographs are displayed onscreen in purposefully jumbled collages. Then he threads in the fictional scenes, sometimes in quick flashes and sometimes in extended vignettes.
Morris’ voice – sometimes playing the naif and asking for explanation, other times insistent and provoking – isn’t heard much in the early going, but the filmmaker’s presence slowly becomes more prevalent. (It’s safe to say that he’s the only documentarian who would do an interview about Central American children who’ve been separated from their parents and would ask, “What would Dickens have called them?”)
Soboroff, White and Gelernt are the heroes in Morris’ story, but there is no shortage of villains: Scott Lloyd, a political appointee who became director of the ORR to his own shock, comes across as a lapdog who’s in way over his head, while Stephen Miller and onetime Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, two of the man who declined to be interviewed, show up on screen looking like they’re walking dead and are proud of it.
“Separated” ends up being a curious hybrid that never quite justifies its boldest cinematic calculations but nonetheless will leave many audiences infuriated by policies that could well return. And perhaps that’s the point: Public outcry helped halt the zero-tolerance policy the first time around, but Soboroff ends on a sobering note by saying that kind of anger is harder to come by these days: “People want to know less now.”
