We often focus on what’s wrong with society, or, regarding my beat, with cinema today. It is easy to be cynical, especially in the realm of politics, as people are easier to manipulate when they’re enraged.
But there are good things as well.
Among the most promising trends of modern cinema, for instance, is the collision between streaming culture and documentaries, which is forging a free-associative journal-cinema that often yields true-crime junk, yes, but that also allows auteurs room to roam, exploring divisive issues in ways that open them up to new audiences. I’m old enough to remember when a Richard Linklater documentary about Texas’ fetish for the death penalty might not be so easy to find. These days, it’s a click away on Max.
Linklater’s “Hometown Prison” is one among three documentaries produced for the anthology “God Save Texas,” which is inspired by the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, a friend of Linklater’s who appears here. Each documentary explores Texas from a different controversial angle that resonates with each respective filmmaker on a personal level. Running nearly 90 minutes, “Hometown Prison” suggests the nucleus of the series, as well as a full-blown Linklater film in its own right.
The setting of “Hometown Prison” is Huntsville, Texas, where Linklater lived off and on as a child and young man. It is where Sam Houston State University is located, where Linklater played baseball and experienced the ribald idylls that inspired masterpieces like “Dazed and Confused” and “Everybody Wants Some!!!” Huntsville is also central to two of Texas’ leading industries: incarceration and execution. When Linklater was a child, the death penalty in the United States was on a downward turn after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. But state-sanctioned killing made a comeback. Home to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, with seven prisons within its borders, Huntsville is the leading city in Texas for executions, meaning it’s also the leading city in the country.
One can easily imagine the documentary that a less imaginative and more dogmatic filmmaker might produce from this subject matter. For a leftie, Huntsville could be a bastion of bloodthirsty racism; for a righty, it could be positioned as an emblem of Americans’ God-given right to defend home and hearth. For Linklater, a left-leaning filmmaker who is also a real artist, Huntsville is a microcosm of America: a place of great, wild and wooly freedoms, capable of wonderful innovations, that is also built on bedrock of evil. Having to hold those two ideas in our minds at once is exhausting, and that’s why political simplifications are so intoxicating. But Linklater is invigorated by contradiction, understanding that’s where real life is unearthed.
Linklater doesn’t pummel his audience with statistics, and sometimes timelines can be fuzzy in “Hometown Prison.” The documentary is bookended by the protests of two executions that, if I read the film correctly, occurred in 2003 and 2019, respectively. Linklater was present at an execution in 2003 as he was prepping an ultimately unproduced film about two football players who end up on opposite sides of the prison complex. Linklater rhymes the protests of 2003 and 2019, as the events are virtually identical, begetting a micro-society of committed protestors. Huntsville has a pocket of resistors that could live in places more amenable to their views, but they choose to stay and fight the status quo. Linklater sees this steeliness as an everyday kind of heroism that shows America’s capacity for idealism in the face of ugliness. Even in Texas.
“Hometown Prison” is shaggy in the manner of other Linklater movies, suggesting a kinder, gentler, more engaged version of his breakthrough, “Slacker,” with many trails winding around a governing theme. What the films share is a wandering sense of discovery, finding rapture in American eccentricity. America’s irreverent weirdness is one of its great strengths, and Texas embodies that idea. Linklater talks to a variety of people in Huntsville, several of whom he grew up with, including prison guards, defense attorneys, and even a rich conservationist who has bought up vast amounts of Texas land to preserve biodiversity. The conservationist has as a side hustle several museums devoted to antiques and oddities, and Linklater can’t help but explore them as well.
Linklater also talks to African immigrants who came to Huntsville for jobs in the prison complex, hoping that it will offer a gateway to more prosperous lives in America. Here, we see an immigrant father who works 13 hours a day before going straight to church, sleeping and starting the ritual all over again. We see his son, an inventive, aspiring artist who feels constricted by the conservative small-town setting, but who also develops hometown pride when he plays the school mascot at football games. We see this young man, a Black teen, smiling in a march with a white girl who appears to be the homecoming queen. This is happening in Texas, in a town that could easily be set up merely as a powder keg of American intolerance. Linklater looks deeper and finds more than any dogmatist would see.
How many filmmakers on any side of the aisle would think to include these sequences in a movie about the death penalty, for instance? What does a young man dressing up as a bumblebee for a football game have to do with anything? My guess is that Linklater found these people, shot this footage, and couldn’t bear not to include it. For dogmatists, people are points in a ledger, while for Linklater they are people. This filmmaker cannot resist including the patches of hope and expression that can be nourished even in towns that are rich in classist, racist cruelty. If we are to fight, we must see what we are fighting for, and this beauty embodies what can be right in this country. Linklater catches the beauty and ugliness of American life simultaneously. The African family seen here contributes to Texas’ pockets of diversity — a diversity that is, in this case, achieved by the incarceration complex that is responsible for destroying too many lives to count.
Linklater allows you to feel as if you’ve been to Huntsville simply by watching “Hometown Prison.” You feel as if you know the geography, as if you know where the conservationist lives in relation to the legendary civil rights attorney who shows us the dent that’s still in his office wall from a bullet fired into his home. By appearances, this elderly, bald, burly attorney looks like a stereotypical Texan good-ol-boy, the kind of guy who might have fired the bullet that’s lodged into his office. Instead, he is an idealist, who defended an expelled Black athlete who opposed paddling in school, leading to a settlement that Linklater says discouraged corporeal punishment in the education system, which insidiously resembles the plantation mindset that governs the prisons.
For a cinephile, “Hometown Prison” reveals how personal and implicitly political Linklater’s films have been all along. The paddling is referenced in “Dazed and Confused,” and many of the “big men on campus” that Linklater knew, one of whom is shown here to have become one of the rare Black leaders of the expanding Huntsville prison complex, have equivalents in his fictional movies. Huntsville in general seems to be the setting that Linklater keeps returning to in his work, literally and figuratively, and its collection of intelligentsia and kooks particularly suggests the richly imagined setting of “Bernie.” A moving subplot in “Boyhood,” involving a stepfather who drinks away his frustrations with his life as a prison guard, is revealed here to have come from life, not only from one of Linklater’s stepfathers but from friends who supervised executions only to find their mental states unraveling. Linklater potently suggests that state-mandated execution is a transmittable evil affecting everyone in its periphery.
In “Hometown Prison,” Linklater implicitly establishes this evil as the boogeyman that has always haunted his films, just out of frame, unseen but profoundly felt.
“Hometown Prison,” along with the rest of “God Save Texas,” is now streaming on Max.
