WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?
Directed by Joe Winston; based on the book by Thomas Frank
Produced by Laura Cohen &. Winston
Released by Area23
USA. 90 min. Not Rated
 

While What’s the Matter with Kansas is tangentially related to the 2004 book by Thomas Frank from which it draws its name, the eponymous film is an altogether different entity. The book detailed the alliance between social and fiscal conservatives and how this has benefitted the latter and economically impoverished the former and how the latter stoke the culture wars in order to electorally exploit the former. While this is certainly in the background of the film, the focus, almost without diversion, is the social conservative side of Frank’s analysis, essentially an intimate look at the earnestly religious, who have spent the past few decades as pawns of the fiscal right.

Director Joe Winston should be commended for his unobtrusive style. He conducts interviews as people go about their business, the camera placed discreetly during conversations, creating a realistic picture of the subjects. It’s not so much what they say but what they do, how they live their lives and what kind of people they are. Even in these postmodern days, where everyone is aware of the camera, adjusting themselves for an audience, there is still an irreducible element of who a person is in his daily life, and Winston captures that. In this sense, Kansas acts as an ethnographic documentary. Who are these people who end up consistently voting against their own interests?

The answers are varied, but a particularly interesting one comes late in the film as Brittany Barden, a home-schooled evangelical Christian, and her family visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. As the mother explains creationism to her children, she reveals the fear that motivates her faith—if we’re not created by a god, then we have no purpose. It’s the flip-side of the old existentialist argument for atheism. Without god, we’re free to invent ourselves. That invention and the responsibility that goes along with it terrify some.

The devout in Kansas are treated respectfully—the film isn’t edited to paint them negatively—but the way these belief systems constrict and confuse them are obvious. Contemplating the defeat of a conservative attorney general in Kansas, one person comments how his party lost because they couldn’t buy the election like the Democrats, utterly blind to the connection between the moneyed elite and the political right. Religion isn’t the problem; a belief system so rigorous that it places fealty over critical thinking is.

The hands-off style then works for showing the varied lives—from evangelical to populist farmer—but finding answers to the title question is difficult. The director’s reluctance to carve out a real narrative allows the viewer to draw her own conclusions, but in doing so, it ends up hurting the overall message. It’s laudable that an answer isn’t forced on the audience, but perhaps that makes the film too subtle. Frank’s point that voting merely on moral issues is actually just a smokescreen to get the working class to vote against their economic interests is not simply lost but the connections between class and religion are never properly handled.

In one sense, the concentration on religion creates a thematic coherence, but in another, it relegates the rest of the discussion to the margins. There are certainly plenty of heavy-handed, blunt documentaries out there that end up being too broad and too pedantic, but since this film is connected to Frank’s book in such an explicit manner, there should be at least the skeleton of his larger argument, instead of relegating the economic part to allegory. Perhaps in the end, the problem is one of framing. It seems like the film is structured incorrectly, engendering different expectations. Andrew Beckerman
July 30, 2010