Two Worlds of Pain, and Another of Fear

The documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon has a particular affinity for her home state, West Virginia. Her previous films about it include “Hollow: An Interactive Documentary,” produced specifically for the internet, which chronicles the struggles of McDowell County.

Her 2017 film, “Heroin(e),” a Netflix original, centers on the opioid crisis in Huntington, West Virginia. It is told largely from the perspective of law officers, judges, faith-based volunteers and others negotiating streets practically teeming with addicts. One of those confronting the challenges is Jan Rader, the town’s fire chief, who was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people of 2018. Discussing the far-reaching consequences of opioid abuse, Rader says when you add “hopelessness, unemployment and lack of education on top of that, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

Sheldon’s new film, “Recovery Boys,” which had its Netflix premiere in late June, steps away from the larger social impact of addiction and homes in on personal stories. It begins at a new rehab facility — Jacob’s Ladder, in Aurora, West Virginia — in a house attached to a working farm where the men are undergoing treatment work. The film follows four patients over 18 months; the first we meet is Jeff, a young father of two who has just been released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for robbery. Jeff is a wiry fellow with a disarming smile, and of the four, he seems to throw himself into recovery with the most enthusiasm.

We are then introduced to Rush, a ginger-bearded veteran of recovery programs who admits, “I’ve never given it my all”; Adam, who seems a babe in the woods; and Ryan, who comes in off the street, without even having detoxed. They are nurtured under the supervision of Dr. Kevin Blankenship, the founder of Jacob’s Ladder. Hazards abound as the patients rack up day counts: A community barn dance that serves alcohol is approached with dread, and it is a nice comic note when the event turns out to be mostly populated by townspeople about three times the patients’ age and not exactly hard-partying types.

I have been sober for almost a decade now, and I am obliged by tradition (and also by my own inclination) not to go into detail about my specific situation publicly; so I will just say that I interact daily with addicts in recovery. As a result, I cannot process a movie like “Recovery Boys” with the detachment that a person who can drink or use recreational drugs safely might be able to muster.

The narrative Sheldon constructs invites the civilian viewer to speculate as to which of the four subjects has the best chance to “make it;” I could not look at the story in that way. What the film powerfully demonstrates is that — and this is something that is hard to say without sounding glib, but it is just the way it is — you never can tell. The person seeking recovery who seems to come in with the best possible attitude versus the person who comes in looking beyond hopeless prods the viewer to make a distinction that is ultimately false.

The beauty of the West Virginia landscapes captured by Sheldon’s camera puts the struggles of the movie’s subjects into melancholy relief. “Recovery Boys” depicts a tough battle, but one that is not necessarily Sisyphean.

“The Pain of Others,” a new documentary directed by Penny Lane that had its debut on Fandor on July 1, is a much more disquieting hardship story. Lane’s film, which is made up almost entirely of found footage — personal videos posted online, and TV news reports and interviews — by and about those suffering from Morgellons. These people describe symptoms that include skin rashes and threads of an unidentifiable fabric emerging from the sores. The condition is self-diagnosed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described it as an “unexplained dermatopathy.” Many in the medical field believe it is a delusion.

But the subjects in this picture, mainly the three women who documented their condition in self-made videos, are clearly suffering from something. Their stories, intercut in linear progression in this short feature, seem like descents into madness. One woman shaves her head on camera. Another, describing a solution that she thinks works, tells the camera “Yeah, drink your pee, it’s awesome.” One of them takes a thread that she says emerged from her lesions and puts it in extreme close-up under her camera, and narrates as the thread undulates, spelling out, according to her, a word. It is only at this point that the movie seems to overtly editorialize, with its electronic music score (by Brian McOmber) growing more low-key and menacing.

Lane’s approach here is dramatically different from that of her 2016 film “Nuts!,” which used animation and comedic narration to deflate the tragicomic story of a medical charlatan from the early 20th century. The movie’s unadorned quality makes it genuinely harrowing.

And while we are on the subject of “harrowing”: The French nationalist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen has often been called a fringe figure. Le Pen is now 90 and no longer an active campaigner, but his daughter Marine Le Pen and granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen are luminaries of the National Rally political party, a descendant of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. The two women are ostensibly more moderate than Jean-Marie Le Pen; their rhetoric nevertheless carries more than a whiff of racism. In April I reviewed a fictionalized film story of the Le Pen effect, “This Is Our Land,” which demonstrates how fascism finds an acceptable face.

Field of Vision, the website for streaming documentaries, recently had a premiere of a short film, “Dancing With Le Pen,” directed by Nora Mandray. Among other things, it should put to rest any speculation that the National Rally party is going away any time soon. Indeed, the film begins with graphics showing that although no Le Pen has won a presidential election, the percentage of the electorate backing Marine Le Pen was at a high in the 2017 election that brought Emmanuel Macron to power.

Alternating with the data and archival footage are thumbnail sketches of a few National Rally supporters, including one resident of Fréjus, a French port town whose National Rally leadership sued to block the opening of a mosque in 2015. (The suit failed.) In a surprise, one of these supporters is a person of color. The tidy film impresses a stark fact: This dance is just beginning.