By Glenn Dunks
We’ve been here before with the filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen. The prolific documenters (four film in five years) have carved a niche as directors of biographical explorations of people who staked a claim for themselves in annals of history through sheer dogged determination: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Oscar-nominated RBG), activist and non-binary pioneer Pauli Murray (I Am Pauli Murray), and celebrity chef Julia Child (Julia).
Their latest is a much more contemporary figure, yet one who represents the directing pair’s most cherished traits. Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down isn’t the most exciting film, but it is an emotionally affecting one...
The title subject here was an Arizona representative who was shot in the head by a gunman in an assassination attempt outside a supermarket in Tucson in 2011. Miraculously surviving, she ultimately returned to Washington D.C., albeit briefly, before retiring and taking on a full-time mantle as gun control activist. Solid stuff to build a movie on. It’s probably not surprising that it hits with a wallop, but it’s a more sincere movie than an expressly manipulative one by nature.
The shooting, which killed six, is obviously an important part of West and Cohen’s film. But this isn’t a film about a shooting so much as it is the immense strength it takes for somebody to come out of the other side of it. Which, it must be added, is something altogether too necessary in its message for modern day America. West and Cohen rely on footage taken in hospital and speech therapy lessons by Giffords’ husband, astronaut and now senator Mark Kelly, as well as plentiful interviews and footage of Giffords going about her day of using her name to fight for background checks of gun-owners and the closing of such loopholes.
I liked this one better than RBG, a movie that I didn’t feel made enough of an effort to grapple with its subject’s dichotomies. That being said, it’s not quite as good as I Am Pauli Murray, either, given that that documentary’s subject was easily their most interesting, curious and paradoxical. Giffords is a great subject for a movie, though. While she cannot speak the way she used to—either in speed or in vocabulary; aphasia has unfortunately cut short her effortlessly likably gabby-by-name-gabby-by-reputation personality—she nevertheless has things to say, and wants to say them. West and Cohen, as well as editor Ilya Chaikan, allow her the space to say them. It would be too easy to cut her off and rely on filmmaking shorthand or having others speak for her, but it shows restraint and patience and ultimately respect to let her say what she wants in her own time. Anybody who has had a family member struck by any sort of mental decline will surely see the dignity that she is allowed there.
There is something old fashioned to the works of West and Cohen. Their films are definitely not flashy. The optimism they put forth through Giffords’ story is similarly classical in form. It is almost refreshing in a way, although I can’t help but wish for the movie to have probed just a bit more. Not even all that far afield from Giffords’ story there were other victims and survivors of the Tucson shooting and there are certainly many more gun reform activists with whom the movie could have interacted. One element that really irked me was the inclusion of Barack Obama as a talking head on hand to say nothing of much substance to the issues at hand. The soundtrack, too, is somewhat on the nose—beyond the titular Tom Petty song, David Bowie’s “Spacy Oddity” soundtracks part of her husband’s journey to the International Space Station.
But Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down more or less overcomes that. It’s a movie that is actively hard to dislike. As with all their films, West and Cohen aim at finding the light in stories of struggle. Given the subject matter at hand, it’s actually kind of nice to be shown something that isn’t entirely fatalistic, but rather quietly, humbly inspiring. And that counts for something.
Release: Currently playing in limited release.
Award chances: The doc branch responded to RBG, but not the two follow-ups. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gabby Giffords appear on the long-list, particularly in a quiet year. Although the name recognition here isn’t quite as strong as Ginsburg and even in the four years since that RBG nomination it feels like it wouldn’t happen today.