The best news in director Joe Winston's What's the Matter With Kansas is that there's a place called the Creation Museum -- and it's in Kentucky, not Kansas. Judging by the footage in this documentary companion to the Thomas Frank book of the same name, the Bluegrass State's monument to Adam and Eve literalism is one of the nation's most terrifying places. When a stentorian male voice booms from unseen speakers that 90 percent of Americans own Bibles but only 38 percent believe that every word in the Bible is true, the place seems designed especially to frighten Christians.
"We know why suffering happens, don't we?" a mother leads her nervous-looking young son as they walk through the museum. "Because of sin." She goes on: "And we know that there's hope. And who's our hope?"
It's not Barack Obama, that's for sure.
Tonight at 7, the film kicks off a weeklong run at Liberty Hall (644 Massachusetts in Lawrence, 785-749-1972). This evening's premiere includes Donn Teske, president of the Kansas Farmers Union and a strong presence in the movie. That screening, for which tickets cost $10 ($8 for students), benefits the Kansas Democratic Party.
More of the review after the jump.
What's the Matter With Kansas has earned praise on the festival circuit for its lack of narration and relatively straightforward look at a few people on both sides of party lines in the state. But if no one in Winston and producer Laura Cohen's film looks properly villainous, no one comes off much above the fray, either.
Angel Dillard, a sturdy-looking mother whose volunteer work centers on her church and anti-abortion campaigning, drops quiet little depth charges instead of throwing flames. Her admission that she got pregnant and left college at 18 comes in the middle of her description of a university sex-ed course as "pornography." Over the fence, abortion-rights defender Julie Burkhart refers to Phill Kline -- running for Kansas attorney general at the time of shooting -- as the "vagina raider." Mullinville curmudgeon M.T. Liggett, introduced as a kind of overalls-wearing farmer whose crop is metal sculpture, seems at first a lovable outsider artist. By the time the camera returns to him standing next to a large swastika on his property as he asks, "Who gives a shit?" his presence has worn thin.
What's the Matter With Kansas is only 90 minutes long, but Winston fails to maintain the brisk pace of the film's first third. The workaday figures on display lack complexity and confront nothing on camera that challenges their views. It's easy to be appalled when college-bound teen Brittany Barden talks up drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (on the way to that anti-evolution museum with her family), but more time spent with her doesn't lend perspective to her faith or her interest in Kline or even make her more exasperating; it just renders her duller.
The problem with casting the spotlight on this small cross-section of ordinary Kansans with two-dimensional political outlooks isn't the flatness of their rural, churchgoing code (or the presumably more cosmopolitan views of, say, Burkhart). It's that whatever is left to say about the disintegrating Republican Party and its Great Plains base-in-waiting requires a broader inquisitiveness and a firmer agenda than Winston and Cohen have in mind.
It doesn't help that the footage is already out of date. With Kline now a political nonentity and abortion provider George Tiller dead, the film's ideological poles exert no magnetic force. The unintended message of What's the Matter With Kansas is that even where diverting the flow of opinion and belief seems an impossibly long and unlikely prospect, dams can burst. There's little doubt that no one here has changed course -- let alone party affiliation -- since the last days of the George W. Bush presidency. A more interesting movie could be made now, even without deepening this one's scope very much, simply by asking how much further entrenched these people, already left behind by the mainstream, feel in a country that elected Obama.
At best, such as in its closing minutes -- when home-schooled Brittany Barden announces that most Americans are uneducated and then confidently relates the inaccurate lessons about the Founding Fathers' religious convictions that she's learned so far at Patrick Henry College, a private Christian school in Virgina -- the film puts us face to face with the future of the far right. It's a friendly, familiar face, but you won't see a smile.
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