The Fight
The Fight does for the ACLU what Page One did for the New York Times: present a fascinating portrait of the professional and personal lives of relatively famous and unknown names while depicting them as heroes for their important work.
Directed by the team that somehow convinced Anthony Weiner to let them follow him around during his doomed political comeback bid — the results of which comprise the excellent Weiner — there’s slightly less controversy among these five profiled civil rights attorneys. But while their adventures are no less entertaining than Weiner’s, the follow-up film arguably far exceeds his travails in shock-and-awe, courtesy of the Trump administration’s relentless assault on marginalized communities.
The thorough, educational, and easy-to-follow chronicling of four landmark cases weaves in Brigitte Amiri (reproductive rights), Lee Gelernt (immigrants’ rights), Dale Ho (voting rights) and the team of Joshua Block and Chase Strangio (LGBT rights) — all of whom come off as affable, hard-working folks dedicated to doing the right thing against forces that will make sympathetic viewers’ blood boil.
The filmmakers’ observational, non-intrusive style allows the lawyers to do their jobs, capturing the lovely highs (such as Amiri and her colleague imbibing celebratory “train wine” after receiving good news) and painful lows (namely Gelernt’s technological bafflement during a particularly overwhelmed moment) that arise amidst their immense daily pressure.
And though clearly in the lawyers’ corners, The Fight makes a respectable bid for bias balance by exploring the dark side of protecting free speech, which turned ugly at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Difficult as it may be to fathom why the ACLU would take on hate groups as clients, the justification is succinctly conveyed by one higher-up who notes that it’s important for the KKK and similar groups have their rights protected so that the ACLU and other justice crusaders can likewise operate freely.
Mixing in the occasional animated rendering of major court hearings, complete with the remarkably composed words of our brave protagonists, the film maintains an active pace by jumping between cases and builds to a genuinely tense finale as the cases’ rulings are revealed.
Though the results are a matter of public record and well-known to many informed viewers, the personal connections forged during the film and the resulting elevated stakes magically turn back the clock and make it feel like hearing them for the first time.
Grade: B-plus. Rated PG-13. Available to rent starting July 31 via the Fine Arts Theatre and Grail Moviehouse
(Photo: Magnolia Pictures)
