‘Monrovia, Indiana’ Is a Sharp, Lyrical Look at Small-Town America

Walt Whitman wrote that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” and in a Whitmanian temper I would argue that Frederick Wiseman is the greatest American poet.

It’s true that he works in images rather than lines of verse, that the people in his movies speak in plain prose and that his own voice is never heard onscreen, but to pin his work under the documentary rubric seems increasingly misleading. Poetry feels like a better classification. A Wiseman film — the newest is “Monrovia, Indiana” — doesn’t make an argument or tell a story. It’s not trying to raise awareness of a cause or a problem, though awareness is its currency and its reward. You arrive at meaning through patterns and rhythms, and you have to do some work to apprehend the structure and the themes. In return, you arrive at a kind of knowledge that’s impossible to summarize, and also to forget.

Monrovia is a town of around 1,000 people (according to the 2010 census) about a 30-minute drive southwest on I-70 from Indianapolis (according to Google Maps). Wiseman and his crew spent time there in what looks like the summer and fall, judging from the changing color of the ripening corn. There are picturesque, pastoral glimpses of cloud-flecked skies and green fields (the cinematographer is John Davey) that suggest the unchanging cycles of rural life.

The human reality of the film is more complicated, as you might expect. Wiseman observes people in groups and in public. There are no straight-to-camera interviews or home visits, but rather a tour of the rituals and routines of municipal life as citizens work, shop, eat, argue and play. As usual in a Wiseman film, we sit in on a lot meetings — of committees and organizations whose business includes zoning, water service and the placement of a park bench. We also visit a pizza place, an antique-car rally, a school and a veterinarian’s office, where a dog is put under general anesthesia so its tail can be cropped.

That scene is gross, puzzling and oddly tender — a thing that happens in the world without context or explanation, and that requires skill, care and concentration on everyone’s part but the dog’s. The surgery’s inclusion can be taken as evidence of Wiseman’s broad curiosity and of his sly sense of humor, a warning to anyone who would try to impose a unifying interpretation on the film.

It is, after all, about a slice of red-state America at a time of fierce political polarization. In the wake of the 2016 election, traveling to Monrovia — a mostly white town in the vice president’s home state — is hardly an idle or random decision, and the unavoidable political implications of “Monrovia, Indiana” give its observations an undeniable urgency.

That may fade in the future, as the film takes its place in the canon of American vernacular art. In the meantime, what’s most striking is how far the national issues that dominant the news media seem from daily life in Monrovia. You can’t say that Wiseman tries to avoid those issues. He plants himself in a gun shop, an Evangelical church and the kind of diner where journalists like to go to test the faith of Trump voters. But instead of the president’s name, we hear jokes and anecdotes and a moving, startlingly cheerful sermon at an elderly woman’s funeral. (To quote Whitman again, on the United States: “Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.”)

If one lesson is that there’s more to life than politics, even in politicized times, another is that there is more to democracy than ideology. I’m not evoking some mythical common ground where we all come together in spite of our differences. There are no mythic places in Wiseman’s world, which is a land of practicality and procedure.

The citizens and office holders of Monrovia are concerned with intensely local matters of land use, economic development and the availability of basic services. In this they are no different from the New Yorkers of “In Jackson Heights,” Wiseman’s 2015 film about that Queens neighborhood. Jackson Heights may be more diversely and densely populated than Monrovia, but the residents of both places speak a common language of civic engagement.

That turns out to be an idiom rich in humor, as fans of “Parks and Recreation” (speaking of small towns in Indiana) will recall. Wiseman’s movies are often funny, and it’s not always easy to locate the source of the laughs. There is no mockery in a filmmaking method that is based on close and sympathetic attention. But he has demonstrated, over and over again, in high schools and libraries and state legislatures and schools, that nobility and ridiculousness are entwined in our DNA. We have a desperate, innate need to take ourselves seriously, and an element of comedy is almost always involved when we do. Or there would be if we could only see ourselves, which is precisely what Wiseman allows us to do.

A teacher — or maybe he’s a coach of some kind; nobody is identified by name or title in a Wiseman film, unless it comes up naturally in conversation — delivers a lecture to a group of teenagers about a Hoosier basketball legend named Branch McCracken. The dynamism of the speaker and the boredom of his listeners feel performed, not for the benefit of Wiseman’s cameras so much as to fulfill the terms of a social transaction, one that seems both entirely familiar and deeply absurd.

Life is theater. Everyone is simultaneously actor and spectator. The old-timers telling stories in the coffee shop are acting out familiar roles, as are the members of the City Council and the participants in a solemn ritual at the Masonic temple. The minister sending his departed congregant off to glory may be the most obvious and energetic showman in “Monrovia, Indiana,” but that fact, rather than undermining his sincerity, is what confirms it.

It isn’t spoiling this movie to tell you it ends in a graveyard. That’s where a lot of things end, including poems. While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. “Monrovia, Indiana” is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.

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Additional Information:

‘Monrovia, Indiana’

Not rated. Running time: 2 hours, 23 minutes.