TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL

Directing: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

“People have died because of the misinformation. I have absolutely no doubt about that.”

This is said by a doctor in Virginia, a de facto representative for all other doctors like him across America, having first-hand experience with COVID-19 in actual hospitals—not in social media feeds populated with nonsense spouted by people sitting in the comfort of their bedrooms. Totally Under Control takes its title from what President Donald Trump said of the pandemic early on in its development, despite repeated instances of pointed inaction on the part of his administration, when he knew as far back as February, in his very own words recorded on tape, how deadly serious this virus was, and is.

I truly wish everyone would watch this film. Even people who are already on the side of science: you will learn something new, something scary, something shocking, from this examination of how the health care establishment of the United States responded from the start, how it adjusted messaging based on new information, and how the federal government squandered opportunities to save lives at every turn.

And that’s not to say medical professionals never made any mistakes in all of this. This film makes it clear, they absolutely did. The key difference is between them and those who refuse to learn from their mistakes. Another interview subject here, all of whom are medical professionals, marvels that the simple act of mask wearing became politicized, how refusing to wear one became a battle cry for supporters of a science-denying president.

Not one of the interview subjects here is a politician. Some people might declare that an unfair bias on the part of the film makers (which includes a four-person team of directors), and those people would be dipshits. What relevance do politicans have here? This film puts the medical professionals front and center because that’s what the politicians should have done from the start. Were any politician interviewed for this, all they would do is spew the same sorry excuses they have already been feeding the media for months. This film offers real, useful information, about the experience of these scientists, how much effort they made at getting the relevant information to the highest levels of government, and how the government generally dismissed them.

That said, Totally Under Control does get one outlier of an interview subject: Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, the family practitioner from upstate New York who touted the unsubstantiated effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, to the point of getting the President’s attention. As Zelenko states here, “I haven’t done any research” (he might be on to something there), all he knows is, when he treated patients, “they stopped dying.” There is also a man who, after being the only person in the doc to reveal—unsolicited—that he voted for Trump, declares what Trump had said about the the government response to be “complete bullshit.”

This documentary is also a fascinating specimen from a technical standpoint, the editors keeping in snippets of footage of each interview subject as they come in to sit where they are to be interviewed, remotely but with a camera man present. In each case, the wall is partitioned by a wall of plastic, the camera set into a cut-out portion of the plastic, so the subjects can take off their face masks. By and large they are impressed with the setup, one of them even saying “You’re hardcore.” It’s clear a lot more had to go into the production of this film than had been the case before the pandemic turned the world upside-down. In fact, this is almost certainly the first film I’ve seen whose entire production occurred during the pandemic—as it is also the first film I’ve seen about the pandemic.

And of course, there will inevitably be countless more to come over time, as is the case with every story imaginable swirling around the Trump Administration. It may even be a fair criticism to note that the film really doesn’t offer much that isn’t already widely available in countless media reports. My counter-argument is that those media reports are also obscured by a constant avalanche of media reports about all manner of shocking and horrible things, easily lost in all the white noise, desensitizing us to the chaos of the world in 2020. Totally Under Control distills this particular, particularly vital narrative in a way no one else has, which is why what I wrote early in this review about learning something new still holds true. If you want things to be given to you straight, then get off Facebook and Twitter and listen to the people featured here.

[Available on demand.]

“Totally under control”? It’s called irony.

B+