By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
Starting today on Netflix, there’s an exuberant, uplifting documentary, “Crip Camp,” this year’s Sundance Audience Award-winner.
In 1971, when theatrical/film sound designer Jim LeBrecht was 15, he spent an extraordinary summer at an experimental camp for disabled kids. After sharing his memories with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nicole Newnham, they decided to make a movie.
Of course, they had no idea that final funding would come from Higher Ground, the production company run by Barack and Michelle Obama.
In upstate New York, Camp Jened claims to be the birthplace of the disability-rights movement. When Jim LeBrecht, born with spina bifida, embarked on the three-hour bus trip into the Catskills, he knew that it was a place for children with disabilities — and it was run by hippies.
Founded by Larry Allison, the ramshackle, countercultural camp welcomed kids with varying levels of mobility, communication and socialization. Counselors like Judy Heumann juggled the polio-stricken with those afflicted with cerebral palsy; years later, she co-organized the 28-day San Francisco 504 occupation.
“We were still in the Age of Aquarius, seeing all these different liberation movements going around,” recalls Jim LeBrecht. “We would talk about the world around us. Conversations would start about our liberation, what we can’t do and why, asking: what can we do about it?”
Filled with inspiring interviews and remarkable archival footage (filmed by the People’s Video Theater), it’s a glimpse into another world. Like other teens, these campers enjoy hanging out, listening to music, falling in love and smoking pot.
Entering college, many campers became committed activists, participating in the protests that helped advance accessibility and anti-discrimination laws for Americans with disabilities.
In “Road Map for Inclusion,” a 2019 report on disability-in-media, Judy Heumann wrote: “It is no longer acceptable to not have women at the table. It is no longer acceptable to not have people of color at the table. But no one thinks to see if the table is accessible.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Crip Camp” is an inspiring 8, sparking a revolution
Because movie theaters are closed, Warner Bros. is immediately releasing “The Way Back,” a gritty, cautionary addiction drama on Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play and Direct TV to meet increased demand for in-home entertainment options.
At Bishop Hayes High School in San Pedro, California, Jack Cunningham was a basketball star with a full college scholarship. But, then, suddenly, for no discernible reason, he walked away from the game, forfeiting his future.
Now in his mid-40s, Jack (Ben Affleck) is drowning in the alcoholism that cost him his marriage to Angela (Janina Gavbankar) and all hope of a better life.
During the day, working in construction, he hides cheap vodka in a metal canister; he spends evenings doing shots at Harold’s Place and drinking more cans of beer at home.
When headmaster Father Devine (John Aylward) asks him to coach the basketball team at his parochial alma mater, he reluctantly accepts, surprising no one more than himself.
As the teenage boys come together as a team, known as the Tigers, Jack sees a potential captain in Brandon (Brandon Wilson), the son of a once-promising player (T.K. Carter). And he finds a new friend in the assistant coach (Al Madrigal), who helps him shape these undisciplined underdogs into a competitive force.
But has Jack has found a reason to confront the demons that continue to plague him? And will he succeed?
Working from a cliché-filled script (originally titled “The Has Been”) by Ben Ingelsby (“Out of the Furnace”), director Gavin O’Connor (“Warrior”) wisely cast Ben Affleck, who has been open about drawing on his own boozing experiences and the dissolution of his marriage to actress Jennifer Garner, all of which has been extensively chronicled in the tabloids.
On the Granger Gauge, “The Way Back” is a somber, simplistic 6, a redemption saga.
In “Clemency,” stoic prison warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard) is psychologically and emotionally exhausted after years of overseeing death-row executions.
“I do my job,” she says. “I give these men respect all the way through.”
But as she’s supervising the execution of a condemned inmate, the carefully-rehearsed procedure goes awry when a harried paramedic struggles to find a viable vein through which to administer the lethal injection.
Shortly afterward, another inmate is scheduled for execution. Convicted of killing a policeman during a convenience store robbery 15 years earlier, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) sits wordlessly in his cell as his lawyer (Richard Schiff) pursues a last-minute pardon from the Governor.
After Warden Williams calmly explains the protocol of exactly how he will be executed, traumatized Woods tries to commit suicide by forcefully banging his head into the wall.
Meanwhile, the inscrutable Warden’s steely dedication to her job has jeopardized her marriage; her schoolteacher husband (Wendell Pierce) is planning to retire and begging her to join him.
As founder of a filmmaking collective dedicated to teaching and empowering incarcerated women, writer/director Chinonya Chukwu spent four years researching exactly what happened before and after the 2011 execution of Troy Davis.
“We visited four prisons and met with female wardens, listening to their stories,” Alfre Woodard explains. “What we found is that their PTSD rate is as high as people we sent into battle for multiple tours of duty. If they marry, their marriages rarely survive. They keep to themselves in a way, because no one can understand what they do.”
While Woodard delivers a masterfully restrained performance, the film is excruciating to watch. The point is how enforcing the death penalty not only dehumanizes the condemned but also takes a spiritual toll on those who carry out the execution.
On the Granger Gauge, “Clemency” is an agonizingly grim 4, challenging society’s sense of justice. Available on Prime Video/Amazon, Fandango NOW and VUDU.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
