[rating=10.00]
I tend toward stoicism when watching a movie, approaching the subject with a cold detachment in the hopes of gaining an understanding of a particular piece. This extends beyond the film to my personal reactions; my emotions are rarely betrayed as I view a film, especially for the first time. I keep myself aware of them, analyzing them with the same detachment I do the film, making note of what a particular scene or decision does to me, but this is an internal process. Watching me watch a movie would be an exercise in tedium, my stony façade betraying little of what I might be thinking about a work.
My process being largely irrelevant, it typically goes unmentioned. I mention it here so that it’s understood that when I say that The Work broke me, the full implications are grasped. Cold detachment, which has served me so well over the years, did nothing to protect me from the emotional devastation I experienced watching this truly powerful documentary.
This is a film designed to ignite the fires of feeling deep inside your being. This is a film about empathy and understanding, about trauma and healing. Its directors, Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, pull nothing back, pushing their audience right up to the face of pain and then asking them to feel it themselves, both the pain of their subjects and the individual pain of each pair of eyes on the screen.
Ostensibly about the Inside Circle Foundation, which works with some of the most hardened criminals inside Folsom Prison to help them on their path to rehabilitation, The Work, like all great documentaries, quickly becomes about more than its subject. Set over a four day period wherein non-convicts are allowed to participate in an intensive group therapy session alongside killers and thieves, The Work is as stunning a portrayal of personal trauma as has ever been committed to film.
We follow three free men, Charles, Chris, and Brian, who each come to the workshop searching for something unique. Coming from disparate backgrounds and experiences, their lives are each held back in different ways, and each man, like the prisoners inside, long for release from some yet to be understood personal trauma blocking their progress.
Over the course of four days, we watch as barriers are broken down and emotions long suppressed come surging to the surface. In the confines of a single room, one by one the men are released from hidden pains and forgotten feelings. Here they are given the space and the permission they need to seek out the wellspring of toxicity from within them and begin the healing process, free from judgment or risk. Systematically, men who have been told their whole lives that emotions are weak are reduced to blubbering messes on the floors of their prison, destroyed so that they can begin to be made whole.
Fascinating is the juxtaposition between the prisoners and the civilians alongside them. While on the surface, the emotional plights of the civilians seem superficial in comparison to those of the criminals that surround them, the criminals in the program—many of them murderers without even inkling of breathing free air again—understand something that many on the outside refuse to acknowledge: trauma and pain are subjective.
Chris, a diminutive young man with a hipster aura and detached demeanor, at one point achieves a breakthrough and acknowledges that much of his problems stem from the time that his father kicked him out of the garage after he failed to grab the right tool. “Go back inside with your mother,” he told him, emasculating the child Chris, and planting the notion that he could never be good enough for his dad in his young psyche.
How trifling that seems in comparison to many of the men in the room! Men who have watched friends died, committed murder, become hardened by life and the choices they made along their path. And yet, they recognize that, for Chris, this seemingly minor trauma has created a block preventing him from actualizing his true potential. They surround him, in a kind of tough love embrace, and goad him into releasing years of pent up frustration, to give a sound to his anger and fear, force him into physically breaking through as he emotionally breaks through.
Through this process the men, many of whom admit having not cried or, really, felt much of anything in years, are reduced to blubbering messes, allowing themselves a vulnerability they’ve often never experienced or knew was possible. This encouragement to feel, in turn, encourages the others to empathize, to find themselves within the pain of the others, bringing them closer together as group, and bringing each individual closer to their truest selves, stripped away of the emotional armor they’ve built around themselves.
McCleary and Aldous show all of this with an unflinching eye, zeroing in on the faces and sounds of unreleased pain. Absent are the talking head moments that populate most modern documentaries. The directors choose, instead, to focus their film on the process itself, allowing viewers to become almost part of the group session. As the work affects its participants, so too does The Work affect you.
While the film focuses mostly on a single group, there are other groups in the room with them, and the film is peppered with the sounds of others releasing their anguish unseen in the background. At first it’s off putting and uncomfortable, but as the film goes on you begin to recognize the process working. Each tortuous cry is the sound of a breakthrough, creating the soundtrack for the breakthroughs on which the directors have chosen to focus their film.
Along the way, the film becomes less about the workings of the Inside Circle (whose paroled participants have a 0% rate of recidivism) and more about getting in touch with your own pains and traumas. It’s difficult to watch The Work without wondering how you would answer the questions posed by the groups. What is your trauma? What pain is blocking you? Over the course of the film, your own pain is amplified by the pain you see on the screen, you begin to feel how the process might work, and see how it could positively affect its participants.
Whatever you might feel no doubt pales in comparison to what’s being felt inside the room you’re watching, but that you’re feeling anything at all is a testament to the power of the process. The Work puts you as close to the room as you can get without being there, and the results are as stunning as they are devastating. McCleary and Aldous have made a film as emotionally raw and poignant as any that has ever been produced, and certainly released one of the best documentaries of recent years.
The Work is now playing in LA and New York, with additional locations to follow in the coming weeks.
