2020 Documentaries, 'Totally Under Control' and 'Time': NPR
'Totally Under Control' And 'Time' Are Two Very 2020 Documentaries. Oct. 9, 2020.
- 'Totally Under Control' examines the Trump administration's response to the pandemic. *Release, Oct. 13, Hulu, more.
I doubt I'm alone when I say that this year has been a blur: Sometimes it feels like only yesterday that I was going to the office or heading outside without a mask, and sometimes it feels as though an eternity has passed. This past week I watched two absorbing new documentaries that both seem to bend and distort our sense of the passage of time.
One of them, which is actually called Time, spans more than two decades. The other one, titled Totally Under Control, focuses on the very moment we're living in.
Totally Under Control is the latest documentary from the prolific Alex Gibney, who directed it with Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan. It's a cool but damning account of our government's response to the COVID-19 outbreak that crams several months' worth of increasingly grim headlines into two hours.
While it's as persuasive and well researched as you'd expect from Gibney, the director of Going Clear and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, it might feel redundant to anyone who's been glued to the news lately. But it's still bracing to see the details laid out as forcefully and with such measured anger as they are here.
Using socially distanced camera setups to ensure everyone's safety, the filmmakers sat down with journalists, doctors, health experts and government officials. Nearly all of them agree that a deadly airborne virus capable of asymptomatic transmission would always have posed a formidable threat in the U.S. But they also agree it was the president's relentless downplaying of that threat and his disdain for science that led us to where we are now, with a devastated economy and more than 200,000 Americans dead...
More, https://www.npr.org/2020/10/09/921601679/totally-under-control-and-time-are-two-very-2020-documentaries
- Official Trailer, 'Totally Under Control' film.