This moving documentary film about the lives of seven homeless women puts a valuable but carefully selected face on poverty, a topic that, in its more mundane forms, rarely makes for good cinema.
Inspired by a newspaper article about homelessness in Santa Monica, a locale not usually associated with poor people, filmmaker Michèlle Ohayon fashions her documentary as a riches to rags study in contrasts, making the statement that none of us are immune from the horror of the streets.
There is something about the cinematic treatment of homelessness, whether for television or the big screen, that is always unsettling. In fictionalized portrayals, liberal idealizations are the norm: the intact nuclear family, with dad de-industrialized out of a job, pridefully squatting in a basement; the wise, white-haired recluse with the well-hidden heart of gold; the genius former lit prof who has long broken with reality. They entertain us and sometimes move us to action, but also leave us feeling that perhaps the reality is not always so neat.
“It Was a Wonderful Life” is not Hollywood. Yet, at the same time, this is politicized ground, and the filmmaker has chosen sides. While the resulting film has great emotional impact and makes its points effectively enough, something still feels amiss.
Lifestyles of the Poor and Homeless
The Santa Monica setting plays backdrop to jarring fact: well-mannered, middle to upper-middle class women can find themselves on the street. These, we are told, are the hidden homeless, the majority of whom are women.
As they struggle to maintain at least some appearance of their former status, familiar rituals become ordeals of survival: three dollar showers at the Y, lipstick applied in the rear-view mirror, wardrobes chosen from the trunk of a car. Each of the women are survivors; they are engaging and articulate, and mostly removed from whatever “bag lady” stereotypes we may harbor.
Some portraits, too, seem more complete than others. Terry is a woman living in a welfare hotel with her three kids, aged about 4 to 17. Her ex-husband pays no child support, and she’s lost her good job to find her skills out of demand, and even “bad” jobs out of reach.
The camera unmistakably captures the fact that this strong, stable, middle-class black woman is frankly adored by her kids, even as they share two beds in a small room. As she speaks, you know they’re going to make it, and as the film concludes you find this family does.
The incredible pathos that runs throughout this film stems in part from the fact that most of these women have fallen from considerable heights, and often cannot reconcile who they are with what they understand by the socially constructed word “homeless.”
Josephine, who sleeps in the car she bought on credit and was left destitute by what she describes as “a bad investment,” looks and dresses to match her upper-middle class and educated past. She distances herself from her reality by saying, “Homelessness is a state of mind.”
Louise, a gaunt 37-year old who sometimes camps and sometimes lives out of a rented U-Haul, speaks of her situation in the past-tense. “I never really did identify as a homeless person.” Both of these women seem utterly alone in the world, yet the filmmaker never explores the root of this isolation.
Marie, who has lived in her car with her dogs for 2 years, seemed the least distanced from other homeless. The resulting insight is devastating. When Santa Monica officials offer the keys to her impounded car in exchange for leaving town she declares, “I’m just considered trash like all the other trash. The people on the street know this, so why should they try?”
A Polarized Debate
The root problem with this portrait of homelessness among women is this: by taking the formerly affluent as its subject, a kind of sensationalism emerges. These women, despite the filmmakers best intentions, do not strike one as at all typical.
If I wanted to make a film about why women become homeless, I’d focus on poor women, who are far more likely to face this fate. But then, the fact that poor women often become homeless hardly seems surprising enough to warrant a documentary.
This filmmaker wants it both ways: wealthy women who become poor make for surprising and tragic storytelling, but the reality is that poor women are many times more likely to become the economic victims that she wants to portray.
Have we really come to the point where, in order to have our sympathy, a homeless woman must be a former society lady in perfect mental health?
A debate has arisen among academics, service providers, and advocates regarding the causes of homelessness, polarizing around the issue of personal responsibility. On one side is the argument that “there are three solutions to homelessness: housing, housing, housing.” Countering this is an obsession with “personal” causes and finding blame that identifies the root of homelessness as drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, and personal irresponsibility.
In “Wonderful Life,” the causes presented, while all too true, cleave closely to economic orthodoxy: inadequate, unresponsive, and scarce services; chronically unpaid child support; the high cost of re-entering the housing market after having fallen out; the lack of jobs available to women whose skills are defined as unmarketable.
In what is an increasingly hostile climate toward the homeless, many advocates feel unable to discuss homelessness in any but purely economic terms. Rising rents plus falling wages equals homelessness. While this is undeniably true, it is but part of an increasingly complex picture.
Homelessness in the nineties has been likened to a Darwinist game of musical chairs, with far more players than places to sit. When the music stops, the fittest get housed. Who does it really help when we only point to the lack of chairs, ignoring the fact that some players are to confused to comprehend the game?
Our view of the problem needs to admit the complexity of our own less than perfect lives. While movies like “It Was a Wonderful Life” will soften the hardest of hearts, and even move some to action, life isn’t the movies, and happens mostly in shades of gray.
To order your own copy of “It was a Wonderful Life” in VHS Home Video format, write: Filmmakers Library, 124 E 40th, Rm. 901, NY, NY 10016. Phone: 212-808-4980.