Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Fight’ on VOD, a Documentary Capturing the ACLU’s Righteous War against Trump

I’m tempted to write this review of VOD release The Fight in all caps because it feels urgent. It’s a documentary about the ACLU, an organization that has been run ragged in the nearly four years since D—-d T—p was elected president, because it defends civil rights and the president doesn’t care to know what those are. The film is sure to enrage people who don’t like to watch good, committed, morally upright people fight tirelessly for the oppressed — you know who you are, you ghouls. For the rest of us, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of lawyers who fight for the right for all Americans to exist on equal ground and, frankly, it might just run you ragged, too.

THE FIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film begins 4,332 American crises ago, with Trump’s swearing-in. A week later, airports are a mess after he signs an executive order banning immigrants from a handful of primarily Muslim countries. That was the first of more than 130 lawsuits the ACLU would file against the current clown show White House, and here I pause to say a lot has happened since this film was made, because I just saw an Associated Press piece reporting that the number is at 237 now, plus an additional 160 legal actions. Maybe this movie should’ve been a livestream but it’s not, so it hones in on four big cases.

The first is the immigration battle, spearheaded by Lee Gelernt, who soon finds himself buried when the administration orders immigrant parents to be separated from their children — and some of them were legitimate asylum seekers who followed protocol. Joshua Block and Chase Strangio leapt into action when Trump tweeted, out of nowhere, that the military wasn’t going to allow transgender people to serve. Brigitte Amiri catches wind that a 17-year-old Mexican woman detained by immigration officers is pregnant and wants an abortion, and is being denied that right by Scott Lloyd, head of the Office of Refugees and Resettlement; she says she’s pregnant because she was raped. And voting-rights specialist Dale Ho is tasked with fighting the administration’s attempts to put a question about legal citizenship on the census, which would inevitabley deter illegal immigrants from participating, and crucially skew the count data.

The Fight hops among these four cases, following the lawyers’ ups and downs, and telling the stories of people affected by the policy battles. It becomes a whirling fugue of phone calls and stress and news reports and court appearances and depositions and developments and decisions and, and, and… it sure looks like the ACLU is defending a full-on assault against constitutional democracy.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Activist documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Slay the Dragon, maybe Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (a little bit), and definitely Weiner.

Performance Worth Watching: Lee Gelernt is calm and confident in court, a reassuring and steady voice for people being detained in airport rooms and, eventually, what sure as hell look like internment camps. In private, at his desk, his desk phone ringing like mad, his cell phone ringing like mad, and he can’t find a charger that works and he doesn’t know how to plug the charger into his computer, and he’s waiting to do an MSNBC spot when a major decision comes down and he just needs five more minutes — well, he looks utterly flustered and overwhelmed. He rubs his face. He looks like he needs a drink or 12. But he gets the job done.

Memorable Dialogue: “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, then when?” — Ho

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Get a load of all these bleeding hearts, caring about the well-being of other people, it’s just sickening. These do-gooders, these LAWYERS (ugh) who could be making piles of cash working for a big firm but who instead chose to devote themselves to making sure human beings are treated fairly and afforded their constitutional and/or human rights. How grossly unselfish of them! They’re all compassionate and susceptible to being emotionally affected by scenes of human suffering, like total softshelled WIMPS. It’s so disgusting. It’s obvious they’re only doing this to make sure Trump doesn’t get reelected.

It’s maddening to watch the Trump administration’s assault on people who aren’t men, and people who aren’t white, and people who aren’t straight, and people who aren’t Christian, and people who aren’t rich, or any combination thereof. If you feel like the news cycle since late 2016 has been a vexatious and embittering offensive against common sense, human dignity, the U.S. Constitution and the most basic notions of progress, well, The Fight reminds us that the ACLU is standing up and taking all those bazooka blasts to the face of decency, and returning fire.

The film — slickly constructed by the directorial team behind Anthony Weiner profile Weiner — captures warm, earnest scenes of Ho nervously practicing his Supreme Court oration in a hotel-room mirror, Gelernt lamenting the fact that he has to work yet another weekend and Block trying out new dictation software with amusing results. They read their hate mail out loud. They give cheeky office tours (“There are probably more tattoos and piercings here at the ACLU than there are at DOJ,” Ho quips). They don’t take themselves too seriously. They’re prone to anxiety and exasperation, because this work is a righteous calling that transcends being merely a job. It forces their eyes toward people in the throes of trauma — Gelernt sometimes seems quite vulnerable while bearing the pressure of thousands of parents being separated from their children, some of them babies, for months and months.

So The Fight offers its share of intense scenes, but neither is it overly self-aggrandizing. It’s matter-of-fact in tone. It cleverly animates Supreme Court scenes with real audio (Ho’s stumbling mirror speech? The final product was just fine). During an aside, it addresses the ACLU’s free-speech defense of white supremacists’ right to assemble in Charlottesville, a scene which ended in injury and death, and comes up with a non-answer (and there won’t be one, at least not one that’s satisfying for all viewpoints). The four cases come to decisions during the film’s climax; some are cause for celebrations and others, less so. It’s an engaging, quick-paced film. It’s called The Fight, singular, because the plural would suggest more than one opponent. That, and The Avengers was already taken.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Fight might be ACLU propaganda if it didn’t make a compelling case for the urgency of its work, or focus on the humanity of all the people depicted therein. I know I moaned, “Oh, the humanity” at least a dozen times.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Fight