Economic trouble brings small-town people ordinary folk, really together, they seem helpless in the face of big business’s avarice and political opportunism. What kicks them into gear is an organizer a community organizer at that who might prefer to lead a self-interested comfortable life without much blame.
It’s a stupidly fun formula, as heartening as it is hopeful. The only Capraesque part it lacks is the happy ending that lets viewers off the hook by confirming that the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice. Maybe it does. Maybe it will. But documentaries rarely tie up all the loose ends in a satisfying dramatic conclusion.
Here, the community organizer is Erica Payne, a longtime political fundraiser who gave up cable news appearances for community dinners in working-class neighborhoods where she tried to get polarized neighbors to push for living wages together. The citizens check all the boxes one might expect from an election year focus group: Trump regretters and Trump enthusiasts long before they ever grew disillusioned with politics as usual empty promises, Democrats leery of their right wing neighbors, everyone working multiple jobs to stay on this side of the poverty line or trying to make pennies stretch by shopping at three different markets.
Payne represents the Patriotic Millionaires, which funds community meetings around economic issues with free meals in hopes that when those go away, citizens will be invested enough to keep being active. Its donors say things like “I’ve had opportunities that don’t exist anymore” and “Am not anti rich, I am anti unfairness.”
They bus citizens to Raleigh for meetings with state legislators many of whom surprise! won’t even meet with them. One irony here among many others is that their district elects the state majority leader, whose legislative power comes from his conviction that his district is so uncontestable he doesn’t even have to pretend to care about the voters. These aren’t swing districts; they are gerrymandered fiefdoms. Payne doesn’t speak truth to power; she tries to get the most powerless to do it.
Will it work? I hope so. North Carolina is a purple state run by a manufactured red supermajority, and the parties increasingly seem to spend more money contesting and staying in power than governing. Its minimum wage $7.25 an hour is less than a third of what a living wage is calculated at for Wake County, and just 1 cent above the poverty line (for an adult with no children) living in the state capital.
That said, what makes this film work on a human level is how Whiteville residents interact with one another. They couldn’t be any more different from each other, but over the course of the movie, they come to see one another. They don’t change through polemic, they change through daily interactions with one another.
The Patriotic Millionaires goal is said to be helping people “find their better selves before it’s too late.” Maybe that better self isn’t revealed by voting record or party affiliation but by being willing to work with and alongside others regardless of voting record or party affiliation for everyone’s sake regardless of voting record or party affiliation even if all these records involve voting differently under various affiliations at different times.
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