This is America The nominees for “Golden Raspberry” the last couple of years began to put the Russian viewer at a dead end: in addition to familiar Hollywood people experiencing not the best period in their lives, a certain “Dinesh D’Souza” with their films began to regularly get into the list. In 2017, his film “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party” was recognized by the organizers of “Malina” as the worst of the year, and on the Metacritic page of the film there was a symbolic score of 2 out of 100. The new film “Death of a Nation” has an even more symbolic 1 in 100. Is the creation of D'Souza so bad?
"Death of a Nation" is the most ordinary representative of political documentary, shot in the format of a historical television program with cinematic inserts, short interviews, between which the director travels across America and Europe. D'Souza talks about the differences in the political platform between Democrats and Republicans, dives into the history of the parties of the United States and Europe, mixing them with rather witty inserts from news and speeches of politicians.
But the main theme of the film is the historical parallels between the Democratic Party of the United States and fascist parties in Europe. They were united by a desire to concentrate the government as much power as possible, support for eugenics and systematic racism. The author recalls that the Democrats fought for the preservation of slavery and supported racial segregation, that Ku Klux Klan figures again left the Democratic Party, that a member of the KKK Robert Byrd reverently buried the entire democratic establishment headed by the Clinton family.
The problem with the film is that a person who understands domestic American politics is not interested in watching it – there is nothing new here. The film is shallow and is designed to appeal to an unsophisticated audience who "suddenly realize they were wrong all these years." The director has long formed a point of view and he is simply looking for confirmation of his beliefs in history and modernity. The interviews are brief and boring, except that all sorts of disavowals from Trump by white supremacist Richard Spencer are quite amusing.
Cinematic inserts are weakly removed, the actors’ play is ridiculous in places. The strongest degree of pathos in some fragments also spoils the impression. Spend 6 million dollars could have been much better. Political documentary works much better when it is based on the author’s real life experience, and when it focuses on one issue (See The Red Pill) rather than jumping from Lincoln to Hitler and then to Trump.
Is D'Souza lying? Nope. All information he takes from open sources and is much less inclined to conspiracy theories than Alex Jones or his colleagues on the left. Some analogies may be far-fetched, but no more. John Goldberg’s wonderful book “Liberal Fascism” has been translated into Russian, where all these questions are described in much more detail and more entertaining than in D’Souza’s films.
So why did critics put 1 in 100? It’s simple: the American left doesn’t like being shown its own story, and the film journalists are 99% left. Some try not to notice this story, others do not want others to notice. We live in a world where Michael Moore has a Palme d'Or, and his films differ from D'Souza's in political position but not in quality. The likes of Michael Moore will be carried around because their agenda aligns with that of the cultural establishment. “Death of a Nation” is a right-wing political agitation, which in artistic terms has no special significance, but also does not deserve such a negative reaction.
6 out of 10