
courtesy of Docudrama Films
Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp) spent a year in the city making the film, chasing down stories and homing in finally on a handful of personalities. This is a ground-level view, told by people in the thick of it: A blues bar owner, a U.A.W. rep, a pair of young avant-garde artists who have moved to the city for the impossibly cheap rent.
Video blogger and poet Crystal Starr provides the film's most lyrical moments as she fearlessly scales abandoned office buildings to look over her devastated city. As you might expect, the film's images are desolate — miles upon miles of gutted homes and empty lots. The images are also sadly familiar: Footage of Detroit's smashed urban landscapes spawned the online meme and veritable visual genre now known as "ruin porn."
The filmmakers occasionally check in with the city's honchos. One meeting, between mayor Dave Bing and a team of urban planners, suggests a city stuck in permanent triage. A fundraiser at the Opera House summons up ghosts of Detroit's rich cultural past.
Detropia has been shortlisted for this year's documentary Oscar. It's also received a fair amount of criticism for its ultimately despairing depiction of the city. When the film screened at last year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, the movie's reps endured a surprisingly hostile Q&A session afterward. The sold-out screening was clearly packed with D-town natives — I was there with several expats myself. Many in the Detroit contingent wanted to know why the film didn't focus on the bright spots — the artistic renaissance, the urban gardening initiatives, the ambitious renewal plans.
I've been away from my hometown for way too long to have an opinion on these things. What resonated for me, in Detropia, was the suggestion that the city is a kind of distant early warning; that gathering class and economic superstorms are just over the horizon.
Blues bar owner Tommy Stephens makes this case late in the film, grabbing the bully pulpit to offer an unsentimental prognosis. Detroit is dying because the jobs are gone. And the jobs are gone because corporations make more money when the factories are in Mexico. A working middle class isn't profitable and that's just how it is.
"What happened in Detroit is now spreading throughout," Stephens says. "There's no buffer between the rich and the poor. Only thing left is revolution."
DVD Extras: More than 90 minutes of extended and deleted scenes.
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Liam Neeson continues his late-career renaissance as action hero with Taken 2, sequel to the 2008 thriller about an ex-CIA officer whose family is threatened by international bad guys.
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TV-on-DVD: Season collections from Merlin, HBO's Life's Too Short, and Ray Ramano's underrated sitcom Men of a Certain Age.