It’s about the cruelty.
We’ve heard that phrase many times over the past eight years. At no time was it more apt than during the family separation policy that the Trump administration enacted days after taking office in January 2017. Errol Morris’s haunting evocation of a documentary – possibly the angriest film ever made by a director who has undoubtedly known how to shed light on angry subjects over the past 45 years – will raise your blood pressure considerably. Especially on a point that “Separated,” produced by NBC News, suggests but never underscores: How could we have forgotten this shocking inhumanity so quickly?
How come there have been no congressional hearings, no appointment of a special prosecutor, and no prosecutions related to this policy – at least since the 2020 election? The policy was supposedly ended in the summer of 2018 after massive public outcry, but over 1,000 children are still in U.S. custody and have still not been reunited with their parents. That’s a government failure that’s almost as damning to the Biden administration as it was to the Trump administration, which actually implemented the policy.
Morris recognizes an essential truth from the start: Much of the American public, and certainly the U.S. government, seem to have “moved on” to this injustice and turned their attention to the series of crises that have unfolded since then. So it’s necessary to do a thorough refresher. He begins “Separated,” based on NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff’s book of the same name, from the beginning: how the policy came about, who drove it, and the impact it had on thousands of children torn from their parents’ arms when the families were intercepted at the southern border trying to enter the U.S. illegally. The idea was to head off the waves of migrants fleeing Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, countries plagued by gang violence: Those who come to the U.S. illegally may never see their children again. And they may end up in cages.
Soboroff admits early in the film that before writing his 2020 book, he had no real background in “source-based reporting” — at least not the kind of in-depth investigative reporting he ended up delivering. He can still be seen hosting segments on the “Today” show or anchoring “Weekend Today,” and it’s truly remarkable how well he balances the “start your morning right!” infotainment demands of those shows with the serious journalism of his book (and ongoing segments from the Border in the years before that). He’s himself a ready-made subject for Morris: Soboroff looks like a kind of 21st-century Harold Lloyd, and is certainly telegenic. But what’s incredible about “Separated” is that he also knows when to get out of the way. He’s the country’s leading journalist, who keeps beating the drum for this horrific story, but he knows it’s not about him. And his time as a “talking head” is correspondingly limited.
Instead, Morris dramatizes the dangers so many migrants face as they flee Central America. Morris works less with reenactments and more with poetic narratives of what many migrants might face on their journey. He focuses on a young mother (Gabriela Cartol) and her son (Diego Armando Lara Lagunes) as they pack the belongings they plan to take with them and then set out on foot through rugged terrain. They sneak aboard a freight train bound for the north; the boy nearly drowns as they swim across a river. And finally, they are detained by ICE agents after crossing the U.S. border. Then they are separated.
Shot in Mexico, with “Roma” and “Bardo” production designer Eugenio Caballero delivering an immersive level of lived-in detail, these scenes are a direct conduit for emotion. It’s impossible not to empathize with what they’re going through and wonder about their hope for what America might offer, however misplaced. It’s a stark contrast to the parallel narrative of how the family separation policy got started, how the mission of U.S. authorities was twisted so that they became tools of fear. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which had always been in charge of unaccompanied children sent to the border (often in the hope that they would meet a family member already living in the U.S.), instead took the lead in accepting children. away by their parents when they were already accompanying them. It was a complete reversal of the ORR’s mission. And all of this to send two messages: Don’t come here. And to the American people: Look how tough we are.
Scott Lloyd, the head of ORR who implemented this policy, is interviewed on camera by Morris and comes across as a fool. But Morris spends a lot of time showing how such a dehumanizing policy came about: by imagining emails, all publicly available and just a FOIA request away, written by Lloyd and others as they tried to formulate this policy. These are antiseptic, animated recreations that are completely at odds with the urgent humanity of the mother-son journey dramatized by Morris. The emails have a tone of bureaucratic formality, with the distinct impersonality of corporate language. It’s all about sender and recipient “getting on board” with the policy and issuing “quick clarifications” and correcting misunderstandings in a way that doesn’t blame one person for everything. It is human suffering masked by bureaucracy and an indifference so profound that even the fact that the separated children are reduced to numbers in a table is still too much. One of the accusations against Lloyd in the film is that he suggested that these tables of children should not be kept in the first place, which may have caused him to deliberately lose track of which children belonged to which parents. (Lloyd has long since denied this claim.)
Then there’s the soul-crushing sound of the children crying in the cages and a heartless guard taunting them by saying, “Well, we have an orchestra here! What’s missing is a conductor.” Like many other moments in “Separated,” it’s been there before. Morris’s mission here, like Soboroff’s in his book, is simply to capture these moments in a format where we won’t just forget them when the next crisis dominates the news cycle. A feature film has a staying power, an ability to lodge itself in your brain, that the endless muddle of 24/7 cable news simply will never manage. All the coverage on MSNBC or “NBC Nightly News” in 2018 was a first draft of the story. A documentary is the more polished, peer-reviewed draft that won’t just get buried under a bunch of first drafts of other stories.
At a punchy 93 minutes, Morris’s Separated seems designed to break through in an attention economy in which attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and outrage over one thing lasts only so long before there’s the next thing to be outraged about. A deeper version of this film could probably have been made, one that really looked at the life cycle of the public’s empathy. One that even took a critical look at, say, MSNBC, which offered airtime to former Trump officials like Olivia Troye and Stephanie Grisham, who now appear to be on the right side of history for speaking out against the former president. But when the kids were in cages, they didn’t resign their posts.
That’s not what “separated” means. And maybe that’s asking too much. When Trump held up his signature and ended the separation policy in July 2018, for many it was the end. Morris and Soboroff remind us very clearly what it would take to reinstate the policy: just another stroke of the pen.
Grade: B+
“Separated” had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. The film is currently looking for a US distributor.
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