‘Newtown’ explores aftermath of tragedy – Snyder’s movie hopes to address issues of loss, grief

This news has been read 4153 times!

PARK CITY, Utah, Jan 25,  (Agencies): In approaching a subject as sensitive as the Newtown, Connecticut shootings of Dec14, 2012, in which 20 children and 6 educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, director Kim Snyder knew first what she didn’t want to do. She didn’t want to make it a portrait of a murderer. She didn’t want to name Adam Lanza. She didn’t want to show the surviving children. And she didn’t want to “cast” the families she would ultimately use to tell the story.

Instead, Snyder let the story come to her organically over a long period of time through the interfaith community in the town. In her powerful and illuminating film, “Newtown,” which premiered Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, Snyder explores the effects of the events of that day on a community — through families, teachers, religious leaders, a volunteer EMT, a neighbor, and a sheriff, among others.

“I don’t really have an agenda here other than to render some truthful trajectory of what aftermath looks like as a town,” Snyder told The Associated Press before the Festival. “That whole first 7 or 8 months, I didn’t feel any compulsion to try to get in touch with the families, and then over time I started to learn more holistically about the community and I started a process of trust building.”

Snyder had just gotten back from Newtown, where she screened the film for 20 participants for the first time. Some of her subjects accompanied her and the film to the Festival.

“I’m a little wrecked. It was intense,” she said.

In addition to developing authentic relationships with many of the townspeople, Snyder also was able to get accounts from those who wanted to talk by setting up a camera in the basement of a church at the service of the one year anniversary of the event.

“In those beginning ones, I would leave the room,” Snyder said. “I just said if there’s something you feel like saying, please say it.”

While “Newtown” isn’t explicitly political, it does have an undeniable point of view as you listen to the heartbreaking testimonials, see the lingering effects of the horrors have had on so many people, and watch the families become accidental public advocates.

“I didn’t want to spoon feed or force the issue of telling people exactly what they should think and do,” Snyder said. “I hope that the film addresses issues of universal loss, grief, and the hope and uplift of human resilience — what we’re capable of in the face of the unthinkable. But I also think that it brings up larger issues. I hope it will open up a conversation — a civil dialogue around things that I think do need to change.”

Victims

Structured more like a requiem than a polemic, the doc ebbs and flows in accordance with the cycles of mourning as it speaks with parents of the murdered children, as well as the teachers, priests, doctors and neighbors afflicted with survivor’s guilt, elegantly and devastatingly capturing the tenor of a small town that will carry these scars for at least a generation. Though it does briefly address the particulars of the gun-control cause which several of the victims’ families have taken up, “Newtown’s” politics are purely implicit, showing us just how much misery one bad guy with a gun can cause, and proves all the more effective for it. Some viewers — particularly parents — may find its unflinching portrait of grief almost too much to bear, but Snyder’s film deserves to be seen, and acquisition attention from doc distributors or TV ought to be forthcoming.

Transpired

There have been bloodier American tragedies in the current century, but perhaps none can match the abject, senseless horror of what transpired in this idyllic Connecticut town three years ago: 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7, and six of the school’s adult staffers, all slaughtered by a disturbed, heavily armed 20-year-old who subsequently killed himself. (The shooter’s name is never spoken; nor does his image appear, a choice that feels entirely appropriate to the film’s objectives.) “Newtown” opens with harrowing 911 recordings and police dash-cam footage from that fateful morning, and though the film never delves into the forensic details of the massacre, the thousand-yard-stare from a state trooper who surveyed the crime scene as he demurs, “I don’t think anyone needs to know specifically what we saw,” says everything a viewer needs to know.

From here, we’re introduced to Snyder’s three primary subjects: Mark Barden, who lost his son Daniel; David Wheeler, father of victim Ben; and Nicole Hockley, who lost her son Dylan. Home videos, some shot shortly before the massacre, give us glimpses into their lives pre-cataclysm, and by following them for nearly three years, Snyder details their gradual, quiet attempts to cope, whether by having another child, staging a memorial concert or, in Hockley’s case, crisscrossing the country sharing her story.

The film eschews strict chronology, allowing its subjects their own digressions as they inevitably return again and again to the trauma that’s never lurking too far outside the frame. Wheeler turns philosophical, pondering movingly on the randomness of life and “the tiny, minor questions that become huge questions when you can’t sleep at night.” Barden and Hockley form a friendship as they speak at hearings and visit Washington, and share a sense of shock when the post-Sandy Hook attempt to expand background checks for gun purchases fails in Congress.

Yet this is not ultimately an issue movie — plenty of other films, including other films at Sundance this year, have tackled the intricacies of US gun policy, and it would take hours to unpack the psychosis on display in the various insane Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, which understandably go unmentioned here. What Snyder is most interested in is the continuing series of aftershocks that one act of savagery can have far beyond its most visible epicenter. Aside from the mourning families, Snyder trains her camera on the well-meaning neighbors who never know how much to interfere; the school’s shattered custodian; the volunteer EMT who slowly realized the extent of the damage from the back of her ambulance. One teacher recalls compiling a spreadsheet to keep track of all 26 funerals. Even footage of a homecoming parade through the center of town is suffused with melancholy. Beyond the numbing statistics and the legislative stalemates and the debates over Constitutional intent, this is what gun violence looks like, the film seems to say; this is what it does.

This news has been read 4153 times!