Harlan County U.S.A. (1976, Barbara Kopple) (Patreon)

70/100

Second viewing, last seen 2001. Ironically, my favorite scene is among the very few not shot in Harlan County (possibly the only one shot outside of Kentucky): A spontaneous friendly conversation between one striking coal miner, who's picketing on Wall Street in what I gather was an effort to tank Duke Power's stock price, and a NYC beat cop doing basic crowd control. On the one hand, this officer seems very sympathetic to the miner's plight, peppering him with questions about working conditions; on the other hand, he perceives his own employment situation—which, he claims, will allow him to retire at age 36, if he likes, at half-pay ($10K/year, which would be roughly $68K today)—as entirely representative, suggesting that the miner should be striving to equal it. Felt like I was watching Brad Pitt kindly but obliviously ask an underpaid, overtaxed schoolteacher "Why don't you just become a movie star, like me?", and the disconnect gets almost hilariously amplified right at the end, when Mr. Miner mentions that they've been on strike for nine months and gets a flabbergasted response from Mr. Cop, who'd assumed this to be day one (possibly of one). It's really the only time we encounter a person who can't be neatly sorted into Righteous or Hissworthy, and while I wouldn't complain that Kopple fails to show "both sides" of this dispute—rarely is management's position of even remote interest; they seek to maximize profit by virtually any means, end of story—I was nonetheless grateful for this brief, slightly more complicated interlude. 

Grateful, too, when Lois Scott emerges as a dominant personality in the final half hour or so, creating at least the illusion of a trajectory that's more robust than just "When will the strike end, and upon whose preferred terms?" Harlan County employs the strictly observational, anti-expository approach of my favorite documentaries, expertly assembling a collection of key moments, indelible images and memorable sound bites over the course of some 13 months; while I reliably enjoy the immersion (and in this particular case also relish seeing reality lay waste to some coal-country stereotypes I'd unconsciously internalized), the potential drawback of making a doc this way is that the result can wind up seeming a wee bit shapeless. Protest songs as structural framework was an inspired idea, and helps a great deal (especially when we get to see an elderly Florence Reece sing "Which Side Are You On?", which I'm not ashamed to admit I discovered via Billy Bragg's Between the Wars), but the film still sorta lacks any human focal point for quite some time, offering instead a communal portrait in which no single individual particularly stands out. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it does make Kopple's contextually valuable decision to spend some time detailing Tony Boyle's truly horrific hit on the Yablonski family (four years prior to the Brookside Strike) threaten to overwhelm what had previously been a very loose-limbed labor diary of sorts. ("There should be a whole movie about this," I thought...and then discovered that there is, starring Charles Bronson as Yablonski and Wilford Brimley as Boyle.) Anyway, this has been instance #649 of me expending most of my energy trying to explain why I didn't love a canonical movie as much as its reputation theoretically merits, when I still consider it largely excellent and have nothing much to say against it other than confessing that it didn't quiiite reach that four-star Wow threshold for me. An invaluable document, certainly.