Town Hall

Kudos to Jamila Wignot and Sierra Pettengill for a very well made documentary. The danger of any documentary touching on the political is that the filmmaker's bias will be the most obvious aspect of the film. Not true with Town Hall which turns the camera on two Pennyslvania Tea Party activists in the lead up to the 2010 and 2012 elections. They do all the talking and there are no leading questions or voiceovers.

The end result is a very human and neighborly look inside the narrow, and yes -- racist, often hypocritical views that fuel the Tea Party and the modern day Republican Party. One example of this plays out as one of the activists, John Stahl, assists his elderly mother in the voting booth. She is in a wheelchair, appears not to have all her mental faculties, and is physically unable to handle the ballot or sign her name. Her son accompanies her into the booth and votes for her and one has to assume that the probability is high that he and his Tea Party voice got to vote twice that day -- all happily assisted by the friendly white, conservative poll workers. No questions asked, no obstacles in place. Later on in the film Stahl offers his unsolicited opinion that most immigrants in the area (camera shot of Latinos walking in front of his car) are illegal and undocumented. A bit later on he is shown at a polling station and making a point to go up to every brown voter and inquiring about their immigration status. Watching all that unfold certainly looks like white entitlement with his mother and racist voter intimidation / harassment with the Latino voters. Who were all citizens, by the way. But from where he sits it was an act of patriotism and completely within his purview. No reference is made to this but viewers will surely remember that Pennsylvania's Republican controlled legislature is among those that passed restrictive voter ID laws which are designed to suppress the voting rights of minorities and the poor -- AKA presumed Democrats.

The other activist, Katy Abram, describes herself as a pro-choice liberal in her youth. Until she met her very conservative husband who turned her on to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who she listens to quite a lot. No surprise that now, at 35, her opinions mirror those of these men. It is Abram who gives us the best look inside the head of an average member of the Tea Party. Abram is a stay at home mom who got politically fired up and took a job with Americans for Prosperity. She burns with the fire of a new convert. She talks a lot so we get to hear her interior conversation. She provides a clear view of why the GOP not only lost the 2012 election but why they were so stunned by that loss. Abram exists inside a bubble of extreme conservatism. It provides the only media that enters her life (Fox, Rush, Beck, et al), speaks only to like minded people, marvels that the stars of this media are always right, and thinks President Obama is transforming America into a replica of socialist Russia. Insulated, naive, xenophobic, misinformed, vulnerable. In short, easy pickings for anyone to exploit human levels of anxiety and fear. No deep thoughts here. But the viewer will recognize the repetition of a lot of official talking points from Abram.

Each activist offers their opinions on some of the safety net programs and what we hear is hypocrisy, lack of compassion and superficial understanding of the programs. For example, Stahl welcomes Medicare for himself and his mother but wants to end the program for others. Abram's reaction to a child's fear of losing the food stamps that family depends on to get to next week if Mitt Romney is elected is a bizarre glee that somehow this child's remark has just proved the whole "culture of dependency" rhetoric of the right.

The filmmakers merely gave these two the forum to explain their beliefs and the policies they would like to see established. The two activists discredit those beliefs and policies all by themselves.