Charlie Polinger’s “The Plague” is a drama about school-age bullying that’s set in a water polo camp for boys in 2003. I went into it expecting a naturalistic atmosphere and earnest vibes, but the movie is intensely stylized, with wide and chilly symmetrical framing that brings to mind the films of Stanley Kubrick.
The sterile institutionality of the setting, coupled with the Kubrickean framing and slow-burn dread, specifically conjure “Full Metal Jacket.” You may find yourself wondering how you came to these associations through a movie that’s ostensibly about juvenile water polo. The mixture of influences and subject matter is mesmerizingly atypical, and Polinger makes the most of it, keeping us off balance.
It initially seems as if the severe style and the subject matter aren’t going to click. Opening shots of a vast swimming pool with boys kicking and pumping around in frenzy seem to be a bit much. Think synchronized swimming offered up as a symbol of timeless human brutality and you’ve got an idea as to the absurdity that Polinger risks here. But this is the rare contemporary movie made by an emerging talent in which the aesthetic heightens the material rather than competes with it.
Particularly eerie and resonant are the shots of the pool from underwater, which suggests a primordial realm in which the children are mere buoys. Perhaps their subconscious understanding of this powerlessness is why they exert power over each other. Or maybe they need to expend (not-so-latently sexual) energy, their thrashing in the water translating naturally into thrashing public property or each other. Polinger is willing to let such associations hang and haunt the movie.
Ben (Everett Blunck) is new to the area, an outsider attempting to fit in with the other boys. His caste is understood to be in the lower-middle, with the polarities embodied by Jake (Kayo Martin) as the head of the pack and Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) as an outcast with a nasty skin rash that the children ridicule. Led by Jake, the boys claim that Eli has the plague and make a show of changing lunch tables when he tries to sit with them. The movie has been constructed as a struggle between these three characters, with the other boys existing as cruel drones who are moved mindlessly by the winds of circumstance.
For a while it seems that Ben is going to be just another person who goes with the pack, feigning sensitivity when convenient — an audacious idea for a protagonist that indicts our own sense of righteousness. We like to think that we are the heroes of our lives, but what if we’re Good Germans yet to be actualized by desperation?
These are the kinds of ideas that movies like “The Plague” touch as they push you towards self-interrogation. But Ben is an even more nuanced creation than we suspect.
Ben is an uncomfortably realistic portrait of a kid navigating a hostile and seemingly hopeless situation that’s unreachable by the adult world, embodied here by Joel Edgerton in a sharp yet poignant caricature of ineffectuality. Ben doesn’t “go along” as we suspect. Bestowing an act of mercy on Eli, Ben switches places with the ostracized boy as the target of the other children.
Here’s where “The Plague” becomes especially nervy: Ben continues to lobby for their approval and even tries to walk back his overtures to Eli. Polinger refuses to sentimentalize these children, or especially the idea of “childhood” in which our lives are foretold by cliches. Sometimes Ben is honorable and sometimes he is weak, contemptible and accommodating according to circumstance. Like most people.
Jake and Eli don’t quite conform to expectation either. Jake is conceived as a monster, a manipulator who’d thrive on the island of the flies not for size, as he is small for an alpha leader, but for his empathy. It’s not that Jake is unfeeling, it’s that he chooses to use his sensors cruelly. This is a more disturbing mold for a tormentor than the usual brute. And Eli is not a cuddly patsy. He is odd and indecipherable, often seemingly taking solace in his ostracization, which gives even him a qualified dignity that Ben lacks.
Blunck, Martin and Rasmussen all give commanding and vividly detailed performances, and Polinger’s work with them is ferociously confident.
One of the most disturbing scenes in “Full Metal Jacket” is explicitly referenced here, the one in which an underachieving recruit is beaten in his bed by other soldiers with a bag of bar soap. That is one of the most shocking moments in Kubrick’s catalogue in part because it’s the rare instance of violence in which the filmmaker seems to be sympathetic to the victim. The corresponding action in “The Plague” is similarly disturbing, priming you for a similar eruption of violence from the victim that shakes the rafters of the institutionalized banality that allows for such situations in the first place.
I don’t think Polinger sticks the landing. He doesn’t want to give us the sort of volcanic pay-off that one associates with horror movies, even if in tone and tenor “The Plague” very much belongs to the genre. Polinger doesn’t want to cheapen his thorny characterizations with easy bleakness any more than he does with unearned uplift. He settles somewhere in the middle and the movie fritters away in its final moments. But make no mistake: “The Plague” is the announcement of a significant new talent.
Given that we now seem to live in a world in which nothing in the realm of the written word seems capable of competing against the onslaught of artificial social media, I am a sucker for art concerned with old-guard writers of consequence. A few years ago, I ate up “Turn Every Page,” the documentary about the decades-long collaboration between writer Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb, and coming away with me this week for a New Year’s cabin getaway with my significant other is “The Insider,” Gerard Howard’s recent book on the editor-writer Malcolm Cowley.
I’m in the tank, then, for something like “Cover-Up,” a documentary by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras about the reporter Seymour Hersh, who has specialized for decades in turning up stories of American corruption on a vast scale. Hersh was a major player in uncovering the My Lai massacre, for which he won a Pulitzer. He did quite a bit of reporting on the Watergate scandal for the New York Times, bringing that paper into a story that was initially monopolized by The Washington Post. Currently an astoundingly sharp 88 years old, Hersh is still writing about corruption on Substack.
“Cover-Up” doesn’t feel as dangerous as the filmmakers’ prior work — remember that Poitras once interviewed Edward Snowden at the height of his notoriety for “Citizenfour” — but it isn’t a hagiography either. Hersh’s famous comfort with anonymous sources is scrutinized, particularly when Hersh, interviewed here at length, gets jumpy over the camera’s access to his yards of secret notes.
Like most singular crusaders skeptical of power, Hersh is ironically comfortable with his power, though he is also open to criticism. If these words sound contradictory, that gives you an idea of what Obenhaus and Poitras manage to do here: wrestle with a person’s irresolvable textures onscreen. Hersh is not afraid to be a cranky lion for the camera.
The documentary relates a series of adventures, embracing an episodic structure that recalls Errol Morris’ recent John Le Carré doc “The Pigeon Tunnel.” The My Lai material is the most potent: wrenching for the ugliness of the violence and exhilarating for Hersh’s willingness to dig it up. He would talk to generals at the Pentagon, seemingly just shooting the shit while other reporters filed whatever was said in press releases. That detail will hopefully jump out to reporters new and established alike: in this era of open American corruption, with a government hostile to exposure, and with corporations swatting out print media in masses, the onus for discovery is on us.
Does discovery even matter anymore? Real news is instantly converted now into chum for ads and partisan rhetoric that serves as a self-perpetuating mythology. And yet Hersh, who it must be repeated is nearly 90 years old, marches on into the void. The lurid, gossipy, and infuriating “Cover-Up” is, by its end, legitimately inspiring.
“The Plague” is now in theaters, while “Cover-Up” is streaming on Netflix.
