John Lewis: Good Trouble
magnoliaEarly on in the ill-fated documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble, the titular activist and congressman utters, ‘As long as I have breath in my body, I will speak up, and speak out.’ What would normally have been a throwaway line took on new meaning with the passing of Lewis on July 17. The line is hard-hitting, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for the rest of this shallow documentary.
Director, Dawn Porter treats her material like a student tasked with writing an essay about John Lewis. The film is poorly put together and attempts to cover far too much of Lewis’ life. Even the song choices reek of amateurism (how on-the-nose is a song with the lyrics, ‘marcha, marcha’?). And just like many a biopic, the film falls into the trap of trying to tell a person’s life story in under two hours. It just isn’t possible, and the result is a messy, unfocused movie.
In terms of trying to add depth, it doesn’t help that most of the film’s talking heads are either people who worked with Lewis but apparently didn’t know him too well or people who the civil rights leader inspired. Clearly, Lewis should have been allowed to tell more of his own story because the various interviewees all end up saying the exact same thing: Lewis fought hard, never gave up and was an inspiration. All true, but also already known. Not to say that the film needed criticisms of Lewis (are there any?), but perhaps an explanation for why he was such a great man. What drove him to risk life and limb for justice? Good Trouble doesn’t know, and I’m not sure Porter does either.
The only time the film dares to say anything meaningful is in its first half. It jumps back and forth between two different timelines, one telling the story of Lewis’ early activism in the 1960s and the other showcasing his ongoing activism in congress as late as 2018. This two-pronged structure is only a vessel which makes the pacing faster, but it still manages to create an important juxtaposition between Lewis’ early and late careers.
Perhaps his most famous bit of activism was the march from Selma to Montgomery to protest a lack of voting rights for black people in Alabama. This was, of course, a victory as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed that very year. But Porter draws an interesting dichotomy between that victory and the resurgence of voter suppression laws in much of the south. This is since a landmark Supreme Court case in 2014 that, as the documentary puts it, ‘took the teeth out of’ the Voting Rights Act. Lewis found himself fighting the same battle he thought he had won all over again.
It’s a thoughtful moment in a documentary that is otherwise gung-ho and optimistic about Lewis and his struggles. Acknowledging that hard-fought victories are not always what they seem is a mature step and is one of the few wholly good choices that Porter makes; it’s almost enough to save the documentary from becoming an unnecessary tribute to a necessary man, but not quite.
