Two films ago, in 2015, the doggedly prolific documentarian Frederick Wiseman made In Jackson Heights, a study of one of the most ethnically diverse locations in the United States, the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, in New York. He's now gone all the way to the other side of the spectrum with Monrovia, Indiana, in which the direct cinema pioneer sets his unobtrusive camera down in a small farming town in the outer suburbs of Indianapolis community almost entirely made out of white Protestants (at more than 60% Republican, it's fairly balanced, politically, by Indiana standards). And here, he looks with his characteristic lack of overt commentary upon a community that is slowly dying, and in the process of dying is clinging to whatever small measures of the old ways it can possibly keep on life support..

Given the present concerns of much of film criticism, it's not hard to find a few voices here and there huffing and puffing that Wiseman has done something very naughty by looking at a population of majority Trump voters and refusing to spend all of the film's 143 minutes (short, by recent Wiseman standards) condemning them for their iniquity. There are multiple reasons why this is an uncharitable reason, but more to the point, it's wrong. One of the other things that's not hard to find are reviews calling the film a "eulogy" or "elegy" for the decline of the middle American small town, and it's easy enough to see where people are getting that from, but I'd rather go with "post-mortem" or "autopsy". This is, in part, because Wiseman is by inclination given to a strong hands-off approach to his filmmaking, and this has remained unchanged for 51 years. He looks without judgment and also without sentiment; of all the important direct cinema filmmakers, he is, I think, the one who's always been best at it: letting people go about the business of being people as he simply watches and stares.

That's the meat of Monrovia, Indiana, but it's been put into a very conspicuous structure - the most conspicuously-structured of any Wiseman film I've seen (which isn't remotely all of them) - based on a series of recurring motifs. It presents an argument, subtly, and without confirming what the argument has been until the very last scene; but an argument nonetheless. I do not know how I feel about this: the great strength of the best Wiseman films lies in their pure fascination with human behavior, and the invisibility of their structure, and Monrovia, Indiana has a very discernible shape and momentum that make it both more watchable and less interesting. But regardless of my grousing, what we have here is a very keen depiction of a community that has grown exhausted and old, a community that clings to the old customs of its past generations not because of some ideological commitment to anything in particular, but because those customs are familiar and easy and can be enacted with only minimal effort or intellectual commitment. One of those motifs I had in mind was the film's series of shots of bored audiences: individuals or crowds who have assembled to watch some important element of Monrovian life, and do so with flat, uninflected expressions that suggest at least disinterest, if not a sullen, silent contempt for the nonsense they've been placed in front of.

What the film does not depict, certainly, is a way of life that's working. We're invited to wonder if it ever did, or if the Monrovians of 75 years ago had the same disaffected boredom towards their own children and parents. In the meantime, people go about the business of doggedly trying to make the world work, one day at a time: the film has its share of Wiseman's customary meeting scenes, mostly involving the civic government, and as with the best of his meetings, the subject matter is typically quotidian and small-scale in the most gripping, fascinatingly human way. Only with the film's sense of overall exhaustion, the smallness of the meetings becomes somehow more gripping and desperate: a local man's concern that the fire hydrants outside of his home haven't been flushed (hydrants also emerge as a motif, though an especially minor one) goes from the simple "parade of life" vibe typical of Wiseman's films to a sort of epic tragedy about the futility of life and the desire to control small things in order to disguise one's lack of control over the big things.

It's a film in which futility and death are never very far away. That last scene I mentioned is of a a sermon delivered at a funeral, one that transforms from "she's in a better place" boilerplate to something gloomier and heavier, as the presiding pastor reiterates the same core points about the goodness of heaven and therefore the joy of dying so many times that it's hard not to take it as his attempt to reassure himself, rather than the assembled mourners (who are kept mostly offscreen). But it is, to be sure, not as huge a bummer of a movie as all that; the people wielding the word "elegy" do have a point in that the film presents the rhythms of a Midwestern farming town as being deeply calming and peaceable, regardless of whether or not they're sustainable. The film shows much of the daily life in Monrovia playing out slowly and methodically; it also brings in quite a lot of what I would ordinarily call B-roll, except it's so much part of the texture of the film that it mostly has the same status as the footage of people. All this captures the steady thrum of the stillness that covers the rural Midwest just as adroitly as Wiseman's 2017 Ex Libris captured the inchoate, lively sprawl of New York, while also serving as a reminder that things like soft blue skies over yellow fields are just beautiful, purely at the level of graphics.

It this means, perhaps necessarily, that Monrovia, Indiana lacks the sheer expansive qualities of Ex Libris, that sense of managing to capture humanity in a bottle, well, one can't knock it out of the park every time. I am unconvinced that there is such a thing as "bad" Wiseman, but there is definitely such a thing as "minor" Wiseman, and this is such a thing. But it is, taken solely in reference to itself, a wholly successful attempt to document the presence of a place: fatigued and uncertain of its future, desperate and a little sad, incapable of rearranging itself to fit anywhere. It understands these people and where they come from, and then with some regret consigns them to the dustbin of history. This might not be the loud kind of political filmmaking one thinks of first, but it's frankly more satisfying and intellectually stimulating because of it.