Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.The F.B.I. spends a lot of time and resources hunting down dangerous criminals and devious terrorists. It also exerts a lot of effort in the pursuit and prosecution of kids like David McKay and Brad Crowder, the so-called "Texas Two" who took a few wrong turns and ended up the main attractions of a three-ring circus of entrapment, paranoia, and dubious motives. How it all came about is a curious and occasionally sickening sight. Documentarians Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega take the story of a how a seemingly hapless pair of activists stumbled into the harsh spotlight of the American security establishment and turn it into an oblique indictment of a society in which fear trumps all. McKay and Crowder were a couple of pleasant-seeming 22-year-olds from Midland, Texas who actually just wanted to make a world better than the one they were faced with during the presidency of George W. Bush. Like so many activists before them, they weren't exactly sure how to go about doing this and appeared to be somewhat adrift in the movement before they came across Brandon Darby. A dark and intense guy ten years their senior, Darby was everything a young activist might look up to. He helped run a social-work collective in New Orleans, and had saved people from post-Katrina flooding. Wielding a guerrilla's dash and flair, Darby bonded with McKay and Crowder but also challenged them to ratchet up their level of protest activities. A combination of cool older brother and street-lefty drill instructor, Darby egged them on to more serious actions.
Unfortunately, Darby turned out to have been a classic agent provocateur, there not just to push the budding activists into taking unlikely and extreme actions but also to ensure that they will eventually go to jail for it. He is also the encapsulation of the film's moral crux: no matter what McKay and Crowder intended to do once they arrived at the 2008 Republican Convention in St. Paul, they didn't appear to go through with it. But that point seems irrelevant in the cold and creepy world of post-9/11 security-state paranoia which Better This World summons all too vividly.
The filmmakers come out of the TV-journalistic side of documentary filmmaking and so weave strands of smartly-handled interviews with the principals throughout the film. Besides getting the story from the arrestees themselves and their (understandably baffled) family, Galloway and de la Vega also loop in several representatives of the prosecutorial team, who talk about the case with admirable dispassion. The result is mostly even-handed and non-confrontational, noting the Orwellian atmosphere of conviction without action but not playing just for sympathy. Undercoating the narrative is an unsettling sense of the modern surveillance society, seeded as the film is with ambient streams of surveillance footage from the streets of St. Paul, where the stormtrooper-attired police seemed to outnumber the protestors. Against their dark, serried ranks, a gaggle of masked protestors seem comically outmatched.
What this searching and provocative film creates is less a case of highwire drama than a punishing stumble into a looking-glass world where criminals are made so that they can be undone and the high, humane ideals of utterly decent people become nothing more than fuel for their downfall.
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