What is your attitude towards homelessness? When you pass a homeless person on the street, do you ignore him? pity him? scorn him? Many people have this attitude that they deserve the lives that they are living and homeless people, through some fault of their own, deserve their lives of homelessness. "They are just lazy," some would say. How then, would these people explain the fact that the average age of a homeless person in the United States is nine years old? Does a nine year old deserve to be living in the street and worrying about surviving to see the next day? Is it just a coincidence that millions of people in the United States happen to be homeless? That millions of Americans just decided, "Hey I'm going to be lazy and live on the streets"? No, things are not like that. This movie clarifies all of this. "Down and Out In America" takes an honest look at homelessness in America. It offers perspectives that many people might not have thought of such as some of the ways people become homeless and the government's disturbing ineffectiveness at solving this problem. Are people being "lazy" when their apartment burns down along with all of their possessions? How do you explain homeless people with marketable skills or college degrees?
One particular striking part of the documentary focuses on how the government is actually making the problem worse. A group of homeless people form a community and live in makeshift town of cardboard, tires, and plastic built on an unused parking lot (rented to them for a dollar a year). The "town" is called JusticeVille. The community is close and everyone helps each other in getting through the hard times. Somehow the city government comes to the conclusion that JusticeVille cannot exist. The homeless people are ordered to move out and the town is destroyed by bulldozers. Another example is the large number of abandoned buildings that are in many cities. The government refuses to fix them up and offer them to the homeless because they claim it costs too much. In one city, a group of homeless Latinos take business into their own hands and fix up an abandoned building at a fraction of the government-estimated cost (and at the risk of being arrested). This just shows how ridiculous the government is being. The government needs to get its priorities straight. The thousands of dollars used to fund lavish banquets for government officials would be more than enough to renovate several abandoned buildings.
There are many other parts of the movie that will evoke sadness, pity, surprise, shock, and disgust (at government ineptitude). This is a well-done documentary that everyone should see. It will open your eyes to just one of the many problems in American society. A country as wealthy as America has no excuse for having has many people at the poverty level and below as it does now. The documentary presents the problem; it doesn't not go too deeply into what the solution is. In my opinion, the solution is for the entire system to change. There will always be homeless people in a capitalistic society where a incredibly tiny percentage of the population get rich at the expense of everyone else. A company's drive for profit results in lay-offs and insufficient wages. A government run by rich white males does not care about issues like this. They care about staying in power, looking good, and helping their rich friends by doing things like increasing military spending to ridiculously high levels. The whole system has to go. The majority of humankind will suffer under a system like this and this will only become more evident as time goes on. This whole last part does not really have anything to do with the movie, but I believe that once you see this movie and know about the homelessness situation, you will at least have to reconsider if this nation is really as great as the government says it is. I believe that one of the main objectives of this documentary is to point out what a bunch of crap "trickle-economics" is and to really pose the question that one homeless woman asks: "Where is the land of opportunity?"
I will not rate this documentary in categories such as suspense, because that really is not applicable.
Directed by Lee Grant
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