‘14th’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Birthright Citizenship Documentary Flounders

The “14th” is a strange outlier in Ava DuVernay’s filmography. While it gestures at urgency akin to “Selma,” “When They See Us” and “Origin” — dramas exploring present political mores through prisms of the past — the director’s latest casts an academic net so wide as to be scattered in its telling. Where its pseudo-predecessor, the Netflix documentary “13th,” scrutinized mass incarceration, “14th” feels more fluid in its aims, circling the notion of Birthright Citizenship through numerous interview snippets, but seldom finding a grounding for this exploration in the present, until quite late into its runtime. The result is certainly educational and informative, but rarely does it feel as challenging or dramatically cogent as DuVernay’s previous work. In the process, it ends up more factual document than documentary cinema, but even its artistic aims enter the realm of doubt, given how it presents (and manipulates) archival images. The movie’s many flaws are hard to ignore, even though its lucid politics render it an important statement, as a work broadly speaking truth to power at a time when Hollywood finds itself consolidating under (and in favor of) dangerous regimes. Where the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, but left the door open to forced prison labor, the 14th Amendment sought to re-build the country after the Civil War by determining legal personhood by birth. The Reconstruction era, therefore, finds itself in DuVernay’s crosshairs, as a means to explain recent protests against Confederate monuments, as well as — eventually, near the tail-end of its narrative — the political controversies surrounding migrancy and ICE kidnappings during President Trump’s second term. These are commendable aims, but they unspool in rote fashion, as DuVernay’s litany of political and academic interviewees deliver snappy soundbites one after another, all but preaching to a choir who would by and large agree with their assessments. No film is beholden to present an opposing viewpoint — especially one that seeks to dehumanize vulnerable people — but “14th” lacks a certain rigor when setting up the arguments it hopes to knock down. It’s not the kind of film that will convince anyone on the fence, and perhaps it doesn’t want to be. But it’s hard not to lose interest in what it has to say, when so few of its subjects are afforded the time to speak or explain things at length, and their very presence feels haphazard thanks to a lack of guiding visual instinct. How each subject is shot and framed (and just vitally, where they’re placed, and how they’re lit) feels so random as to be chaotic when assembled. Your eyes, and your attention span, might just struggle. These sit-downs all become part of an extended montage, wherein educated, experienced and highly-informed subjects like NAACP president Sherrilyn Ifill — whose proclamations ride a fine line between emotionally and academically convincing; she’s the movie’s heart and soul — are given the same weight as standup comedians and Twitch streamers. It’s nothing if not self-defeating, much like the movie’s use of old photographs of enslaved and newly emancipated African Americans, which it grants three dimensions and even movements through eerie digital effects. The desire to view the dehumanized with the human familiarity they deserve is a noble aim, but this sort of manipulation — by generative A.I. studio Asteria — may as well be necromancy, forcing digital dimensions upon the dead and turning them into simulacrums. It’s uncomfortable at best, but at least it’s a minor issue by runtime, compared to the movie’s larger structural problems. The news these days is fraught with headlines about rights and safety nets being stripped away in the United States, for citizens and non-citizens alike. “14th” adequately mirrors this present with the horrors from the mid-1800s and beyond. However, where “13th” powerfully established cause and effect, its successor is more focused on drawing comparisons, than on threading this particular needle. Its graphic intertitles — usually, a hand slowly stripping away the points of a star — structure the film around the text of the 14th Amendment itself, but this gimmick relies on a highly sentimental view of America and American-ness, as a de-facto virtue. It skirts, perhaps, more closely to the very nationalism it wants to combat, without taking a truly egalitarian stance on the humanity it hopes to preserve. As the movie hops between broad points about what the framers of the Amendment intended, and how their words have been interpreted of late (or outright discarded), it makes an argument for maintaining a firm and ethical point of view that adheres to the very norms which, it admits, have been eroded. It contains no call to action against, or even detailed understanding of, these dire circumstances, and for any reasonably informed viewer, it features little by way of novelty or revelation beyond pointing at the problems we see around us every day. During interview upon interview, the numerous lawyers and politicians seen in “14th” seem to tell us that which we might already know, or at least intuitively understand, about our changing world. It’s likely no fault of their own; their words having been shaved down to this bare essence, by an edit eager to sprint forward, toward vague conclusions at best. Perhaps looking to documentary cinema as some kind of savior is folly, but when a movie aims to provide answers, yet only ends up making the questions more dispiriting, it feels more like a loss than a victory. What can we do when the powers that be inevitably assert more control — legally or otherwise? “14th” doesn’t seem to know, and the alarm bells it sounds have already been ringing for quite some time. But if knowing thy enemy is half the battle, then it’s at least half effective.