The piercing of eyes of Frederick Wiseman take a look at a small town in America’s heartland in Monrovia, Indiana. As usual, Wiseman’s film has no talking heads, no narration, no guiding voice outside of Wiseman’s ingenious editing which creates a seamless narrative throughout the various haunts of this unspectacular township. Even in the scope of small-town America, Monrovia is hysterically small (it’s population at the last Census was just over 1,000 people), but Wiseman is sharp enough to explore each stop on Main Street, the workers in the corn mills, the churches and high schools, even the tense meetings of the city planning committee.

The people of Monrovia are kind and God-fearing, and almost entirely white. Wiseman makes no explicit political comments – to the benefit of everyone, there is no sign of Trump – but in a way Monrovia, Indiana is a film about how these small American towns have morphed from quaint to unnerving. Gun shop owners delight with customers about the strength of their firearms, while members of the city planning committee use a lot of coded language to argue against spending government money on additional housing. This is a snapshot of a city caught in a contradiction: too small to have an impact, but too isolationist to attract the people to create growth.

Morovia, Indiana is true fly-on-the-wall filmmaking. The shifts between the mundane, the hilarious, the melancholy and the tragic are so natural, so indebted in the experience of the town itself. Wiseman documents a city small enough to have a population that cares, so much so that there is an entire meeting between a dozen people to discuss the dire issue of adding a bench to the local library. If Monrovia is the kind of town that is often said to have been left behind, Wiseman instead cherishes the small township’s ability to keep its head above water. There is a version of American evolution that might include the vanishing of places like Monrovia, but Monrovia, Indiana is here to encapsulate the kind of place that has stood for America for such a long time.

 

Directed by Frederick Wiseman