Belfast, Maine

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.

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?

At first, when the movie came on, I thought it was a fairly good representation of the lobster fishermen that make their living fishing on the Belfast coast. But as I got deeper in to the "documentary" itself, my heart started sinking lower into my stomach. Watching one woman pick lice from another woman's head, is not an impression I want people to have about the town that I grew up in.

There are some good spots in the movie, the lecture on the Civil War, the plant sculpturing class, etc. But other scenes in the documentary made Belfast look, in my father's words, "Appalachian." In my opinion, Frederick Wiseman did not represent the full aspect of the city, he documented the aspects that he wanted to document, and as a result his documentation is a faulty one.

If you want to see Maine life accurately portrayed, this movie definitely isn't the movie to see.

Belfast, Maine is an extraordinarily well made documentary. You are riveted to the screen, drawn into the lives of individuals trying to get by working in factories, dry cleaners, bakeries. I sat watching, never leaving for the full four hours.

Now for the bad news. As a resident of Belfast, I couldn't help but see that a huge segment of the population was being ignored. Where were the professionals? I remember one doctor portrayed, on call in the emergency room. Lawyers? Real estate agents? Where was my favorite latte shop? Where were the hundreds of magnificent homes in our historic district? No. The director shut us out. He wanted to show what my boss refers to as "Hidden Belfast," not the one most of us see every day. I wish he had told me up front. The film ignores what Belfast has become over the past decade, a renaissance town, a tourist destination, with a beautiful waterfront, comfortable bed and breakfasts, and wonderful downtown. A place that two years ago the Cohn Brothers and their families (of Fargo fame) chose as a vacation destination.

Belfast, Maine (the documentary) all too clearly reminded me what a good director could do...by not showing certain footage (and other careful editing,) totally distort the truth.

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.