Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Documenting something as immediate and horrifying as the aftermath of the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary is more than just a daunting filmmaking challenge. It’s a challenge to our responsibilities as humans, as citizens, as neighbors. How do you tell this story — the story of 20 first-graders and 6 of their teachers gunned down on a regular December morning — in a way that avoids exploiting such a tragedy when the story is the families and neighbors and friends and community members in Newtown. Director Kim Snyder helms Newtown with a kind of tiptoe step, taking great care and sensitivity to give these parents and survivors the space to tell their own story.
Telling the story of Sandy Hook is particularly tricky because in many ways, the grief is all there is. The killer, Adam Lanza, left behind no note or easy breadcrumb trail to a specific motivation. Snyder’s film pointedly declines to refer to Lanza by name, perhaps figuring that if there was nothing to be gleaned in the way of motive, better to leave his name out of it. The way the parents (and some siblings) of the murdered children talk about it, Lanza looms like a monster out of some too-real nightmare. The only real grabbing-point when it comes to Lanza, in fact, are the guns; while the witnesses in the film make mention of Lanza’s mother keeping multiple firearms around the house, Snyder pivots to the politics and the efforts of the victims’ families to get some kind of gun-control legislation enacted in the wake of the tragedy. Watching these efforts get thwarted by the U.S. Congress is a thing of quiet outrage.
Unsurprisingly, the most compelling parts of the movie are the testimonials by the families and community members. There’s a range of emotions there; one mother speaks clearly about the knowingly irrational ways in which she likes to keep the memory of her son alive; the local priest talks about the devastation to the community; another mother can barely raise her eyes to the camera she’s so angry. The film feels like a peek into lives that all ground to a halt on December 14, 2012, and the only real forward movement has been the attempts at political action that have been thwarted. It’s hard to wrap your head around the kind of frustration and anger that that must bring to these families who have already been so hollowed out. One of the more politically active fathers talks about preventing the next mass shooting, and the viewer is only left to think of how many mass shootings there have been in Sandy Hook. The tragedy in Newtown is sometimes talked about in fatalistic terms as the last gasp of hope for preventing gun-violence through legislation; 20 first-graders murdered in broad daylight wasn’t enough to get anything done, the line of thinking goes, what ever will be? Are these just a fact of American life now? (In the time since I sat down to write this post, there has been another mass shooting at an airport in Fort Lauderdale.) Newtown speaks to that sentiment on a couple levels. The frustration at Congressional inaction is one. But by telling the stories of these families and this community, Snyder’s film makes an unequivocal case that it can’t ever be okay. In its gentle-ness and light touch, Newtown gives these familes’ stories the room to make an impact.
