“CITIZEN KOCH” My rating: C+ (Opening July 11 at the Tivoli)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
“Citizen Koch” is the notorious documentary about the Tea Party movement that PBS was funding and then pulled the plug on, leading to accusations that one of the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers (David Koch is a major funder of public television) had basically censored the project.
Perhaps. It’s also possible that PBS bigwigs concluded on their own that Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s film — they’re the team that made the Oscar-nominated Hurricane Katrina documentary “Trouble the Waters” — simply isn’t all that good to begin with and is clunkily partisan to boot.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin
Not to mention that the title is a case of bait and switch. Although the Wichita-based Koch brothers pop up now and then, they are hardly the subjects of the film.
Now as a progressive, I approve of Lessin and Deal’s attempts to draw the lines between the rise of the Tea Party, the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling which virtually bestowed personhood on corporations when it comes to messing about in the political process, and Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s successful attempts in Wisconsin to ban collective bargaining for state employees.
The film’s laying out of this rightward shift (accompanied by the sort of ominous, rumbling musical soundtrack usually employed by horror pictures) is clumsy and confused, but useful. Anyway, it scared the hell out of me.
Just as important is the film’s examination of Wisconsin working stiffs who voted for Walker because he’s anti-big government, and then found that they were the targets of his housecleaning. This is important because it suggests that after years of cozying up the right at least some blue collar voters are realizing they’ve been sold an economic bill of goods.
But here’s the thing: I’ve lost my enthusiasm for partisan documentaries. Whether they’re by Lessin and Deal on the left or Dinesh D’Souza on the right, I’m getting frustrated with the sort of one-sidedness exemplified by Fox News.
“Citizen Koch” doesn’t even attempt to examine why some fairly reasonable people might embrace libertarianism. Before the first frame hits the screen the film has already decided who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 