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Farm girls
Liz Garbus does justice to Girlhood; plus another look at The Caine Mutiny
BY GERALD PEARY

Liz Garbus, the maker of Girlhood (2003), which screens February 6 through 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts, was also co-director of The Farm: Angola, USA (1998), which is among the greatest — and gloomiest — of all documentaries. At Angola, Louisiana’s maximum-security prison, there’s little hope on earth for the 5000 male inmates, 75 percent of whom are African-American, 85 percent of whom who will never escape this hellhouse jail except by dying.

Girlhood is also a grim, unflinching, documentary look at incarceration, American style. But there’s a flicker of a chance for its imprisoned teen and female protagonists: Shanae, 14, African-American, and Megan, 16, white, who at the beginning of the film are serving open-ended sentences at the Waxter Children’s Center in Maryland. For one thing, the staff at Waxter seem, if not especially trained or educated, decent and humane, and definitely on the side of the girls. For another, as opposed to Angola’s pitiless, intractable parole board, the review panel that decides on the fate of Waxter inmates is open to arguments for releasing them. When the girls are penitent and have paid their dues.

Will Shanae and Megan ever be cleared for release?

At 12, Shanae repeatedly knifed an adolescent friend, and the girl died. At 14, she has a very hard time processing the murder, or feeling anything about it except bafflement. "Am I supposed to be upset, beat myself up for it?" she asks. There’s no remorse. Her story is that the stabbing was kind of in self-defense, without intention to murder anyone: "I blanked out." So how was it that the other girl perished? Shanae is almost haughty about it, telling of the fateful day, smirky and detached.

When she’s not pondering her crime, Shanae comes off as a pretty nice, not abnormal girl, with disarming doe eyes and pigtails. She’s given a surprise birthday party at Waxter, with all the other girls springing out at her, and the poignant celebration seems much like what would happen outside prison, a teen occasion ending in a pajama-party sleepover. Shanae is ready to split from Waxter, that’s her feeling. But Waxter isn’t going to consider releasing her until at a minimum she takes responsibility for that homicide. Besides, Shanae’s mother is ambivalent about having her daughter come home.

Megan is a psychological mess who has scurried away from countless foster homes before being shipped to Waxter. She’s smiling and charming one minute, moody and very down the next, a drama princess. If Shanae mostly ignores Garbus’s camera in her face, Megan takes advantage and acts up, having various tantrums, both sincere and calculated, caught on video.

What did she do? "I cut her mostly with my rings," Megan dispassionately discusses a moment of brutality. Other misbehaviors are unspecified, but they’re motivated, so it seems, by her screwed-up relationship with her mother, a heroin user and prostitute who, in and out of prison, has barely gotten in touch for years. "I feel like an old woman in a young girl’s body," Megan declares, though insisting she’s not angry at her mother. Her belief is that if she could be reunited with mom, all problems would cease.

Painful and always compelling, Girlhood adheres to the informal rules of cinéma-vérité: no voiceover, don’t interfere with your non-fiction story, follow wherever it goes. For three years, Garbus gutted it out with Shanae, from 14 to 17, and Megan, 16 to 19. Yes, both girls eventually make it out of Waxter and head homeward. On the highway toward Baltimore, their urban nirvana, they seem like Dorothys aglow before the Emerald City.

Both are reunited with their mothers as real life transforms, in act three, into an old-fashioned Hollywood saga. One girl sputters and flounders in the inner city. The other girl returns to school, makes good grades, and, with love from her family and community, heads for the high-school prom in a stretch limousine. It’s a Cinderella ending, only this Cinderella got drunk and lost her virginity at 10 and was raped by five boys at 11.

EDWARD DYMYTRYK’S The Caine Mutiny (1954), which is at the Brattle February 9 and 10, is a pedestrian adaptation of Herman Wouk’s Navy-set bestseller novel, which somehow copped a Pulitzer Prize. Still, the movie deserves a look because of Humphrey Bogart’s paranoid, Nixonian, blame-others Captain Queeg. Amid the 1950s American zeitgeist of "The Boss Knows Best," Bogey’s lunatic commander is startlingly prescient of our Dilbert era of dysfunction at the top.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com


Issue Date: February 6 - 12, 2004
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