All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have not been able to go to movie theaters nor film festivals.  So now, with the help of award-season screeners, this month I am catching up.

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I feel as though I am a little late to the party with this movie.  The documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy was released in September, no doubt to get ahead of the upcoming election.  Well, now it’s December and I have checked out.  After the misery imposed by Donald Trump over the past several weeks, I have long-since changed the channel.  I simply don’t want to hear about elections for a very long while.

Judging the film for its merits and not for its timing, I find a movie whose message is pretty clear: Get out and vote because too many people have worked too hard and sacrificed too much for you to sit at home and not be part of the system.  The filmmakers Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortéz lay this message on top of a very heavily researched series of allegations charging the Republican party with stealing elections by tying the registration process in knots.

The journey of the film is to see how we got from there to here by rewinding the clock and tracing the history of voter suppression, which in the early part of the 20^th century was strangled by poll taxes and literacy tests.  Yes, the Voting Act of 1965 did open the doors for black voters, but Garbus and Cortéz also contend that modern practices in recent elections have whittled away registered voters and closing polls in certain districts.

This is all interesting stuff, but again, timing.  Coming to this film a little over a month after the nightmare clown circus that was the 2020 Presidential election and writing this review on the same day that the Electoral College made its official announcement that Joe Biden will be the 46^th President of the United States, it perhaps seems to be an afterthought.  By this point, I’m worn out.  I did my duty.  I cast my vote.  I still maintain that I never had a candidate, but I voted and I have moved on.

But, is the movie right?  Possibly.  I’ve been so inundated recently with so many conspiracy theory and accusations of wrongdoing from both sides that often it is hard to tell.  I have an old-world brain, one that sees the process of a democratic election (that’s with a small ‘d’) in the arena of good sportsmanship.  You may chuff at my statement, but let’s face it, at the end of the day we are all basically on the same team.  We all inhabit this small planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children’s future.  And we are all mortal.