MARCH 14, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 6

There is a moment in Frederick Wiseman's Welfare that I cannot shake. It is the voice of the film, its critical theme, heartbreakingly spoken by a man who has lost all hope. He paces outside an office in the New York City welfare complex, waiting to plead his case, waiting to get bus fare, waiting to get anything. He mutters, jacket in hand, weary and exhausted, about nothing and everything. He is out of options and all hope, and what is left is what he's been doing for what seems like a lifetime: Waiting. Yet just as heartbreaking, we know as well as he that after seeing the 150 minutes that came before this one, nothing is coming.

Wiseman's film is an endurance test, for everyone involved. The man is talking to anyone who will listen. At this moment, he is talking to us, but in another it will be the man next to him, and in another, it will be the entire system itself. He laments about Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. "Do you know what happens in that?" The man says loudly, but strained, as if he is mustering the last of his energy from his last meal. He peers into the office but everyone is busy and no one is paying attention but us. The man finishes his point, heaving out his words again, "Do you know what happens at the end? Godot never comes. Nothing comes."

It is the deflation in his voice that stays with me. The moment is actually a little humorous, perhaps from his over-dramatic retelling, or perhaps from the fact that we know exactly his point when he first mentions Beckett's play. We wait in anticipation, as in the play, as in Welfare, and the moment is that much more poignant and fitting. Of course, I am not getting the quotation exactly right, and the description of the scene may not be entirely accurate. Frederick Wiseman doesn't believe in home distribution. I saw Welfare last year at the Chicago International Documentary Film Festival, and it is a testament to the work that so much of the emotion stays with me.

The pain is what's important here, and to remember that is to remember everything. Wiseman's observational documentary puts us in the chair next to his subjects, and we navigate the maze of lines and forms and protocols without a map. They are equally as lost, desperately searching for where they need to go in order to get some money. We feel for them in the unflinching long cuts, engrossed in their pleading conversations with the welfare office agents.

One distraught woman strains from both shouting and crying as she tells the agent about getting the run-around from the State. She's told to go to the downtown welfare office, even though she just came from there. She needs a different form that only that office has. She is being evicted and she can't make it there before it closes. And so on, and so on. The details are different, but each story is the same. In being so close to them and in staying with them intermittently for so long, we feel for them. At no point is the film overcome with monotony, it may be difficult to watch, but it is never boring.

Wiseman, in his long career, has been criticized for being too even-handed. The standard-bearer of cinema verité filmmaking, Wiseman's documentaries are anything but even-handed. Welfare may not be biased, but there is a definite point of view. It is not so simple to say that we are aligned with those seeking aid against the callous, hard-nosed welfare agents. They are not the bad guys any more than the patrons are the good guys. Everyone's hands are tied and we feel as much for the beleaguered employees as anyone else.

Welfare seems to be a comment on the endless red tape of bureaucracy as a whole, as a system, painting the entire cast as hampered and distraught and exhausted. More importantly though, the film calls into question the state of society that led to the need for this building. Everyone's hands are tied, and everyone is tired. Some throw fits, some are battered down by the protocols, but there is little distinction between the aid givers and the aid seekers. Everyone is a victim in the New York welfare office, and yes, those pleading have it worse off than those hearing the pleas, but at the end of the day, when both sides go home devastated and drained, no one looks for consolation in the score.

In the theater, as the lights rise, a heavy weight is lifted off our backs. For some it is just a movie, a dramatic retelling of the common experience of waiting in frustration. We've seen it before in other movies and on television. A character grumbles and stews over being stuck in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. They deal with the disgruntled and rude employee who harshly tells them they need to wait in another line. The moment is mildly tolerable when we see it, but rendered completely trivial in the light of real frustration. These are real people with real tears under the painful fluorescent light of New York, and the almost unbelievable level of trust Wiseman has with his subjects brings us that much closer to understanding what they are pleading for.

Different moments pop up as I consider the emotion that has stayed with me. I cannot remember dialogue, nor can I remember the ending. I keep coming back to faces, different expressions that remind me how devastating this ordeal can be. The man that so eloquently and precisely states the crux of the film with Waiting for Godot has a map of the world on his face. He's been waiting for so long, what else is there left to do? One gets the sense that being here is like being nowhere, lost in purgatory. Perhaps more harshly, they are stuck in Dante's lost eigth circle of hell that was lost to history. Frederick Wiseman's Welfare does not let us sit back and be a fly on the wall as many seem to equate cinema verité to be. We are active and we are affected deeply, as much as anyone in the movie. For that, nothing but the experience matters.