Belfast, Maine

This is not a film for anyone under 35. Wiseman manages to portray Belfast as some sort of hellish retirement community. The entire film is done without a hint of humor, and Wiseman seems to be taking these people's gray little lives as over-seriously as they do. Rarely do any of the people of Belfast crack a smile - it's as if living in Belfast has literally sucked all of the joy out of their lives.

This film fails on every level. As entertainment, it fails miserably. As serious documentary, it fails because it grossly distorts your image of Belfast - the youth of the town are completely ignored, and the elderly, the infirm and the retarded are represented again and again. As character study it fails because of episodic nature of the film - we never stay with any person long enough to really learn anything about them.

"Belfast, Maine" is one of the worst mistakes in the history of the documentary. A poor, poor film.

I live in Belfast. Belfast is a miserable, lifeless hole. Evidently, we have a "thriving" art community...where? This film has done an excellent job of encapsulating the misery and miasma.

Wish I could have voted 7.5. Wanted to check the demographics on Belfast after watching this film. Have to agree with so many others the focus was predominantly down-scale. Would like to have seen the 'other half', so to speak. From this film, it would seem the town is down-trodden, mostly illiterate & suffering from 2-digit IQs. Compassion & intelligence were shown, but not frequently. I'm sure Belfast is much like any other town, with a fair mixture of all levels.

I like to 'observe' people & gather much from interactions, what is said between or among them.

It's a decent movie but left me wanting...to know more, to get a more even feel.

This is a great and disturbing movie. I have lived in Maine all my life, and worked in a number of the jobs depicted here, and I too, as some viewers below, find myself romanticizing Maine, thinking you will find the true Maine in movies other than this one. That you can find the "true Maine" not in the elderly, the infirm, not in the soul-crushing factories, and not in a string of defendants, mechanically pleading guilty to the inevitable and petty charges leveled against them in a courtroom. It is absolutely not true that the youth are not represented here--you see them in the hospitals, as infants, in the stories told by hunters, and as the bored faces in the classroom, repeating the presumably inspiring banalities of an English teacher. And all of the people you do see were of course once much younger than you see them here. It's only four hours--what else do you have to do today that's so important?

The summing-up of the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman's life's work--a four-hour record of a mid-sized Maine town that features local ringers for the cast of Wiseman's other movies: high-school teacher, cops, ER receptionists, social workers, homebound elderly folks, ministers, babies, meat-handlers, the dying. An English-class lecture late in the film on the meaning of MOBY DICK opens up this oracular work, which combines a hard-nosed appraisal of the facts of everyday, small-town life with a Whitmanesque embrace that leaves you overwhelmed and grateful.

Wiseman's films make even the masters of American narrative movies look like self-promoting, candy-flinging hucksters. The hallmark of a Wiseman scene is a whipsaw between unbearable heartbreak and Swiftian laughter. The piece de resistance here features an extremely large, slovenly-clad teacher who resembles a popular weatherman, reading from a book on meteorology to a roomful of profoundly retarded elderly men. The sincerity of the teacher's work, and the look of dutifulness and agonizing boredom on the face of the pupils, make you want to laugh, cry and scream all in the same instant.

Building to a soaring epiphany in a Belfast church, this movie functions on so many cylinders--spiritual, political, metaphorical--it seems insane that Wiseman hasn't been embraced as a national treasure. See it where you can, even if it's late-night public TV: this is the most penetrating, insightful and boundlessly rich community mosaic since NASHVILLE.